Battle with the water: Heroes were numerous when flood threatened Mercy

When Tim Charles recalls the impact of the June 2008 flood on Mercy Medical Center, he talks about many behind-the-scenes heroes who played key roles as rising floodwaters threatened the hospital.

'Bob Olberding (who retired in 2011 as Mercy plant operations director) was under tremendous stress on Friday evening (June 13),' says Charles, Mercy president and chief executive officer. 'There was a point where Bob's team just had to send him to his office to get some rest, because he had been going at full speed.

'Bob is a very emotional guy, and this was his baby.'

Two days earlier, Mercy Medical Center had begun notifying long-term care facilities in surrounding communities that the hospital was ready to accept patient transfers if it became necessary.

'We knew there would be challenges in surrounding communities, and we wanted them to know we were ready to deploy our resources to help them,' Charles says. 'We were on high alert as an institution, but more because we thought we would be receiving patients.'

On Thursday morning, June 12, Charles received a call from Dr. Carla Schulz that brought the first hint that Mercy might be directly affected by the rising Cedar River.

'Carla's office is located at the top of a little hill down Eighth Avenue, and she told me that sandbagging had begun around the back door,' Charles says. 'I really had no concept that we would be in harm's way, because we're at 11 feet above the river and we're a long way from the river.

'We felt that St. Luke's was more likely to face challenges, because of its proximity to the river.'

As Thursday progressed and heavy rain fell, the water was rising toward the hospital. Flood crest predictions were constantly revised higher.

'We had prepared for all kinds of disasters, but I'm not being at all facetious when I say that flooding and patient evacuation were not in the game book,' Charles says. 'We called the staff together and put out a call for employees to help sandbag. I remember saying that we didn't think we were going to be affected by water, but we were sandbagging as a precautionary measure.'

A perimeter of sandbags was created around the hospital's glass-walled entrance through the Lundy Pavilion.

The city's sewer system was overwhelmed, and water was backing up into the lower levels of Mercy. Employees ran from bathroom to bathroom, removing toilets and sinks, and plugging the holes with towels, sandbags and inflatable rubber bladders.

'We had a visit from a fire captain at about 7 p.m. Thursday, and it became very clear he was asking me for our contingency plan,' Charles says. 'With our physicians, we had decided to move our intensive-care patients before moving our less sick and ambulatory patients.

'We primarily moved them to St. Luke's, where we were able to get them stabilized.'

At St. Luke's, hallway beds were added and an ancillary emergency department opened to help handle the additional patients.

About 9 p.m., Charles decided to evacuate Mercy's remaining 183 patients. With the potential loss of power to the elevators, moving patients out of a nine-story tower down stairwells would be a slow and difficult operation.

Charles praised the work of Chad Ware, Mercy emergency department nursing manager, who quickly stepped into the role of emergency management coordinator as the hospital prepared to evacuate.

'We all knew that Chad was an incredible nurse and great asset to the hospital, but what you see in situations like this is true grit and leadership potential,' Charles says. 'As anyone who worked with him that night and watched him manage the evacuation would tell you, we discovered an unbelievable leader in our organization.'

Ware, a member of the hospital's disaster preparedness committee, recalls an all-hands-on-deck atmosphere leading up to the evacuation. He says Mercy's heart catheterization lab staff donned scrubs and helped sandbag.

'They would work the sandbag perimeter until a patient requiring an emergency catheterization was brought in,' Ware says. 'They would come in, shower, perform the procedure and then rush back out to continue sandbagging.'

Ware says the hospital's nurse managers coordinated with each other and their staffs to quickly prepare patients for transfer. Mercy's information technology department shifted into high gear to print each patient's medical transfer form.

'I remember Katy Cox, an emergency room nurse at the time, standing at the door while we had patients lined up for evacuation,' Ware says. 'Her job was to track that each patient had a bed and their medical records. She knew exactly where they were going, and no one moved through the front door until she checked off everything.'

When Ware needed someone to triage patients and get them into either ambulances or vans, Dr. Timothy Sagers was ready to do it.

'Dr. Sagers was an emergency medical technician before he was a doctor,' Ware says. 'He was a perfect match.'

Ware says Keith Rippy, executive director of Area Ambulance Service, worked to bring in additional ambulances from as far away as Peoria, Ill. The National Guard and ordinary vans were pressed into service to transport patients to other facilities.

After the evacuation of Mercy, St. Luke's emergency department saw nearly double the usual number of patients. The department was under construction at the time. Construction workers, who saw the need for more patient rooms, would race to complete six rooms in two days.

Dave Siegel, an assistant supervisor with Ryan Cos., was vacationing with his wife in Minnesota when he saw a television news report that Mercy was threatened by flooding.

'Dave told his wife that they needed to get back to Cedar Rapids,' Charles says. 'He knew there was an air vent in a small courtyard next to our new parking ramp. Water was pouring into our basement through that air vent.

'Dave created a wooden plug, and he and Bill Olberding manhandled it through that dark basement. They physically forced it into the vent and bolted it in place, stopping the flow of water.'

With an electrical storm approaching as sandbaggers were trying to prevent water from entering the Lundy Pavilion through the large windows, Charles was told by a fire department captain that the volunteers were at risk.

'I remember telling people hoisting sandbags off trucks that they needed to get out of the water,' Charles says. 'Many of them had driven here from sandbagging the city's only remaining water well on Edgewood Road when they heard we needed help.

'Dr. Tork Harmon, an anesthesiologist in town, is a really big guy who was helping sandbag the front of the building. Tork says something like, 'Not until we're done.' '

Previous actions by Mercy's board of directors were critical in mitigating the impact of the flood and enabling the hospital to reopen in 16 days.

'Several years earlier, the board had made the decision with Bill Olberding and Jim Tinker (former Mercy president and CEO) to move our power plant out of the basement to a location on higher ground on the north side of the hospital,' Charles says. 'When they did that, it was probably because they knew we needed to increase our power capacity.

'It turned out to be a real game-changer for us. If it had remained in the basement, we would have been dead in the water.'

When Kay Crist of Mercy's accounting department and Bill Coppock of TrueNorth Cos. approached Mercy's board several years earlier with a recommendation to increase Mercy's insurance coverage from roughly $50 million to $75 million, the premium increase was small.

'The insurance company probably believed it would never have to pay,' Charles says. 'We ended up using $68 million of our coverage.'