Hurricane Ike

And speaking of customers, and I'll start with you, Brian, do you have a memory of, of at the end of the process, getting the lights back on, getting power restored, that stands out to you from your over 20 years of experience?

You know, I've got a couple, but one of the big ones for me, when I first hired on, uh, we had Hurricane Ike blow through Dayton, and we'd only been here about three months, so we were, we were green, new, ambitious.

And, you know, we, when you start out as a lineman, you don't start working live electrical components, right? Well, Hurricane Ike came through, and all of a sudden like 90% of the system is, is down, right? 90% of the system is dead.

So, you know, the leaders would go out and they would ground the line and make it safe for us to work, and then it's like, "Have at it, boys," you know? "Get, get to work." So we got to do a whole lot of stuff.

It was kinda like boot camp for us.

But then a few hours later, we felt that nasty water seeping up from the floorboards.

And fast forward to Hurricane Ike, I'm then working in our emergency operations center and I'm worried about my mom and I'm checking in on her.

And it turned out that my childhood home and the place my mom was really proud of was a total loss.

And for her, It took four years from the time that she had to be out of that home before she could get back into that property, from going to my sister's house, to my house, to a hotel, because she thought she was a burden.

I'm working our emergency operations center.

I'm worried about my mom.

This is going to be much more rain than Hurricane Ike.

And my mom's had opened up her home to neighbors.

And, uh, and I came in a couple years after the storm.

It was Hurricane Ike.

That was 2008, and I got there in 2010.

But I would say for, from a, for a resident, you know how, uh, FEMA, every, all these different things talk about self-reliance, and really, you know, yeah, it's completely true.

And, um, so for example, there's a study of what happened after Tropical Storm Allison, which was in 2001, and really devastated the, the Texas Medical Center in Houston, um, that it resulted in about two billion dollars of damages just to the TMC.

And, um, then Hurricane Ike in 2008 caused loss of income from disrupted clinical care of ab- about a hundred million dollars for the UT Medical Branch, which, which is in Galveston, Texas.

Um, they ended up, at UTMB, they ended up having to lay off 20% of their staff because of the clinical care losses related to Hurricane Ike.

So that's just to give you sort of a sense of proportion about how important it is for us to think about resilience and how important medical centers are in particular to the economic health of a, of a, a region, particularly a region like ours that has a tendency to sort of be right there in the crosshairs of so many of these disasters.

We also have seen some studies looking at how the, uh, sea level rise and other aspects of changes that are happening in the climate are i- impacting areas along the coast in particular of the US.

Yeah

... what are you looking for, a Hurricane Ike?

A thun- a thun-

For the weather to blow a million miles an hour?

Incidentally, the name Isaias joined the hurricane name rotation as a replacement for Ike.

Now, that's because 2008's Hurricane Ike was a highly destructive storm in Cuba and Texas.

I was in Key West a day or two after it came through there, and the conchs didn't look too happy about it either.

One more.

I'm just saying.

Okay, in world news, we have had a 7.6. earthquake in Panama with now two aftershocks within the past two hours and we're not talking Panama I'm talking like down there by the canal so now that's triggered tsunami warnings on top of the hurricane ones and there's three of them Rachel Simon and Isaias or Isaias or big damn storm whatever you want to call it the only time they ever got that right was Hurricane Ike even Tina Turner's like get your shit and leave it's going to be bad so I'm just saying like Making landfall tonight.

It's east to east.

Right there.

So anyway, that's how we got Isaias.

Now, Isaias got a promotion from the minor leagues, falling just short of being a actual hurricane name, because of Hurricane Ike in 2009.

So if Ike had not been as devastating as Hurricane Ike was, Ike's name would still be in the rotation, but if you are a devastating hurricane...

For instance, there will never be another Hurricane Katrina.

There might be a hurricane like Katrina, but there will never be...