Institutional Memory

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Galveston city and county have a history of resilience. Despite our mercurial weather and politics we somehow manage to pull together when we need to. Many of those of us living here now have ancestors that rebuilt the city after the 1900 storm and erected the physical embodiment of that resilience and willingness to take on seemingly insurmountable tasks together when needed.

Only a few years back we once again proved that those qualities are still just as strong when we worked together to rebuild our communities after Hurricane Ike. We couldn’t have gotten as far as we have so quickly without governmental help, but much of that recovery happened by neighbors helping neighbors.

The wounds left by Hurricane Ike are diminishing, although we have a long way still to go before the physical and psychological damage is healed. Enough time, however, has passed that we’re already losing some of the institutional memory that our decision makers from that time had. How do we, as a community, keep the myriad of lessons learned despite the changes in city leadership and as people in key roles from that experience cycle out?

In a very forward thinking move, many of our city and county leaders attended an emergency management course at the FEMA training center in Emmetsburg, Maryland last week. It says a lot about the current leadership that they realized the importance of taking all of these busy, important people away from their duties for an entire week with the purpose of preparing them for how to deal with all stages of a catastrophic event, from emergency response all the way through debris management, restoring infrastructure and financial and psychological recovery.

The course itself was intense and even included three “table top” exercises that lasted several hours where we had to work together to address different problems that arose. A central theme that was repeatedly stressed was the importance of relationships and communication in getting a jump on both the response and recovery phase. It helped that we were locked into a compound in the middle of a blizzard! What little time was spent out of class was spent together continuing course discussions.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a group of Beach Patrol supervisors were taking their own course in disaster response. Kara Harrison, Josh Hale, Mary Stewart, and Kris Pompa went through a grueling swift water/urban flooding course in San Marcos. They spend 4 long days and one night in wetsuits learning swift water rescue techniques, search and recovery, and how to respond during a flood. This meets a goal we’ve been working on for some time on the Beach Patrol. We now have every full time member certified as a “Swift Water Rescue Technician”, which will prove invaluable to our community when we have our next flooding incident.

We don’t know when but we all know there will be another big one. The challenge is to keep the skills and institutional knowledge ready for that eventuality. Being prepared takes work, commitment, resources, and community buy in, but it’s essential.

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Tommy Lee of GEMS and Peter Davis of GIBP at FEMA training camp in Maryland, 2014.

Phosphorescence

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The lack of moon and heavy fog made the night darker than normal. The wind was calm and the water was like glass. As the stand-up paddler’s board cut through the frigid water, it left a glowing trail of phosphorescence behind. A wave broke ahead and sent a yellow/green light pulsing into the night.

Nowhere is the natural ebb and flow more apparent than along the coast line. Just as the tide rises and falls, animal and plant life increases and decreases depending on the amount of light, food, salinity, or predators. No doubt, human interference disrupts the natural cycles when we add pollutants or overfish certain species, but it’s hard to separate out what causes what. The relationship between organisms is so varied and complex that isolating underlying causes is tough.

We’ve seen a number of species multiply above normal in recent years. One season we have heavy Sargassum Seaweed, the next you see the wingtips of cow nosed rays everywhere in shallow water. Every few seasons we’re visited with a pesky red tide that causes inflamed mucus membranes and fish kill. The most recent bloom is something fairly benign but definitely one of the most beautiful phenomena we come across on the Gulf Coast.

This particular bloom is a type of algae and it involves tiny glow in the dark specs to shine when movement/oxygen affect them. There’s usually a bit of phosphorescence in the gulf but not enough to see. But this week there were so many that it lit up the night. It was mesmerizing.

The ocean has many forms of life that generate their own light. Animals that live deep in the ocean below the level reached by surface light often have weird glowing appendages to light their way or scare off predators. Others have huge eyes sensitive to the slightest glow. One of the coolest animals is found right here in the gulf and is really plentiful. The Ctenophore, commonly called the “Comb Jelly”, doesn’t sting and is pretty small. It feels like you touched a piece of gelatin floating in the water. Sometimes they are so thick that it’s like swimming though goo. At night, when prodded they produce about the same amount of light as a firefly.

Life struggles to find a balance. We know this in ourselves as we feel the natural mood swings we go through that are exacerbated by lack of sleep, improper diet, or a disruption in our routine. We also see it in the natural world in all types of forms. Normal amounts of ebb and flow ads spice to our existence. We wouldn’t appreciate the sun as much without the rain or the warmth without the cold. By the same token we wouldn’t value the days we feel like all is right with ourselves and the world if we didn’t have days that weren’t so good.

The trick within ourselves and in the natural world is to keep these fluctuations within a reasonable range.

White Pillars

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The family of five showed up at the lakeside park in north Texas on Christmas Eve. Camping over Christmas was a long standing tradition and, as the kids were getting older, they were able to take longer hikes.

They followed a trail that ran around the lake. The youngest daughter was seven years old and lagged behind, unnoticed by the older kids and adults. As they made their way back to the campsite they realized the young girl was missing. What followed were something we know all too well- frantic calling and searching and eventually a 911 call.

Multiple agencies responded and researched the area. Eventually a tracker dog focused on a spot not too far from the campsite. A Department of Public Safety dive team arrived. They knew that this was a recovery operation and the time for potential rescue had long passed. They dove for several hours in the frigid waters but found nothing.

Thousands of people saw the heartbreaking story on the news.

Hundreds of miles away a woman in Louisiana woke up in a cold sweat. She had a dream that she saw the young girl in the water just in front of several white pillars. She couldn’t shake the image. It wasn’t a normal dream. It felt so real. Finally, after not being able to go back to sleep, she picked up the phone and made a call.

The woman was so convincing on the phone that the dive commander decided to follow his gut and go back out to the lake. On the far side of the lake there were some white barrels standing upright. They looked like pillars from a distance. He called his team back and they set up to dive. The first diver entered the water and resurfaced with the girl’s body within about 40 seconds.

This is a true story that was recently related to me by the very same dive commander. He was ex military and currently a police chief. He’d overseen the state dive team for many years, had seen a lot, and was definitely not the kind of guy that embellishes his stories.

It’s hard not to hear this and not believe in something. We see the world through our own lenses so some might say it was divine intervention from some type of “higher power”. Others might say its voodoo, telepathy, or an interconnectedness of being. My favorite is a connection that travels through a force that permeates the universe and binds it together (for the Star Wars fans).

It’s surprising how many people in public safety are superstitious. But after these men and women learn to follow their instincts and see patterns in seeming chaos, there is a real reward. There are too many police investigators that solve crimes by weighing the evidence AND following their instincts, or fire fighters that can “read” what fires will do even when it seems illogical.

Sometimes you have to trust your gut to see the unseen.