Command center a beacon in the storm

FE&P’s Bryson and crew led Rice through long night, recovery

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

She doesn’t know the precise hour the sound began, but Barbara White Bryson will never forget the sound itself.

“It was sort of like the sound of blowing on a piece of grass between your thumbs, but very, very loud.”

The wind had started rushing through every window crack in the Founder’s Room in Lovett Hall. It was just a short time later when Bryson, associate vice president for Facilities Engineering and Planning, and her ride-out team saw water streaming in from the high windows, down the west wall.

It was a tough night at the Founder’s Room, which served as Rice’s hurricane command center from Thursday on. Bryson and her staffers, Facilities Service Center coordinators Olga Castaneda and Loranda Iverson, kept tabs on the storm, monitored students hunkered down in the colleges and shelters and aided the police, maintenance and custodial crews who braved dangerous conditions to keep systems up and running.

Getting to that point was no piece of cake. Regular emergency planning sessions began to pay off when it became apparent Ike was headed toward South Texas, and the Crisis Management Team (CMT) kicked into high gear in the week before landfall.

Bryson woke up before dawn Friday, ready to rock and roll. “I’m an early riser anyway, but Ike woke me even earlier than usual,” she said. Friday began with goodbyes to her husband and their pets, who evacuated. She then moved her personal supplies — a bed roll, a change of clothes and a Crock-Pot of chili her husband made the night before — into the command center.

“Then I did the kinds of things you do early in the morning before a hurricane: I picked up a prescription and got some cash,” she said, leaving her car at her Museum District home and returning to campus on her bicycle for the duration.

Back in the Founder’s Room by 7:30 a.m., she got down to business, organizing the center. “Mark Ditman showed up just before lunch Friday with a meal for me from one of the serveries,” she said, smiling. “It was very thoughtful and much needed at the moment … and it was delicious.” Bryson credited Ditman, associate vice president for Housing and Dining, and his team with doing an extraordinary job keeping everyone fed during the event.

By midday, radio communications had been set up between the center and the college masters, shelters, Rice police, Central Plant and maintenance crews. Robin Forman, dean of undergraduates, calmly and thoughtfully coordinated communications with the masters, and Paula Sanders, dean of graduate and postdoctoral studies, deftly ran the graduate student shelters with sharp focus and good humor, Bryson said. “They, along with Dianna Marshall, Bill Taylor, Kathryn Cavender and my FE&P team were my partners during the night, each at their own stations.

“In the afternoon, we brought Olga and Loranda over and switched all phone calls to the command center,” said Bryson, who by this time was monitoring weather reports on cable TV and the Internet. On Friday at noon, graduate students were to report to the on-campus shelters, and all students were told to report to their colleges.

“By 7 p.m., everybody had to be in the immediate shelter area,” said Bryson. “And there was a point in the storm when we pulled the trigger and said every student and every graduate student needed to be in the core shelters, the most protected areas.”

Not everybody had that luxury. “All during the evening, as the wind picked up, we had people from maintenance and the custodial crews out there, moving between the buildings, solving problems and dealing with issues. (Chief of Police) Bill Taylor’s people, as things started ripping apart, would report in to us. And sometime in the early morning, I said, ‘I want all our guys inside, buttoned up.'”

She recalled one of the crew heard a call that the bronze doors on the south side of Janice and Robert McNair Hall were taking in water. “Without asking permission to go out and solve the problem, two members of the FE&P ride-out team just went and did it and stopped the water intrusion,” Bryson recalled. “As it happened, thank goodness they did, because they were there when the water booster pump in the building went out, and they fixed that as well. That was a big deal.”

At the height of the storm, wind and water started streaming into the Founder’s Room. “We have all these historic portraits of the founder and the first board members in that room, so we took them off the walls and put them where we didn’t think they’d get wet,” she said. “Then we had to roll back the carpet because the floor was starting to fill with water. Olga and I were trying to mop it up at the same time calls were coming in over the radio.”

However safe Lovett Hall is, she said, “when you have water being driven horizontally into any wall system at 80 mph, unusual things will happen. We have very solid buildings on this campus, and still water found its way in.”

Between 3 and 4 a.m., with the winds at their strongest, the command center commander worked on a recovery plan and delivered it to her team via e-mail. “I saw we had a challenge ahead of us,” she said.

Bryson wasn’t the only one assessing the challenge ahead. As soon as the winds lessened a bit, Ditman made his way out of his sheltered area across campus to Brown College to determine whether damage to the exterior brick wall would compromise the student shelter area.

Bryson ventured outside for the first time in the early morning, after the cable blinked out and left the crew watching the weather through rabbit-eared TV. “I just needed to go out and see for myself,” she said. “I put on a slicker and did a loop, down to the (Brochstein) Pavilion and back, and there were moments when I had to stand with my feet braced because the winds were blowing so hard.”

When the storm had largely passed, by midday Saturday, the first-response process began. “The same people who rode out the storm were here for the next 24 hours doing that,” said Bryson. “Now we had to deal with the ripple effect of the storm.”

Because Ike had “put the building systems and campus infrastucture out of whack, the FE&P team was dashing like crazy to get things stabilized,” fixing backed-up toilets here and stopping floods there.

She gave big pats on the back to Assistant Vice President for Facilities Russell Price, maintenance manager Hugh Ton-That and their custodial, grounds and maintenance teams for their “extraordinary” work during and after the storm.

“There were a whole bunch of heroes out there on our FE&P team, Housing and Dining, Rice Police and in the shelters, and nobody should be held up as more important to the successful storm ride-out than anybody else,” she said. “Some were literally in the line of fire, but everybody here was critical to the effort.”