The University of Texas Medical Branch estimates $600 million worth of damage from Hurricane Ike.
Jonesboro Telecom Comes to Galveston Hospital's Rescue October 6, 2008
By Jamie Walden
Arkansas Business
While ferocious winds and rain from Hurricane Ike tore through Galveston Island, Texas, on Sept. 12 and 13, wreaking havoc on power and telephone lines, one hospital remained online with the help of an Arkansas telecommunications firm.
Optus Inc. of Jonesboro kept the only hospital on Galveston Island, the University of Texas Medical Branch, online during the torrential storm, except for a brief window at the height of the storm.
UTMB staff had evacuated most of the patients the day before. However, many of the staff members stayed until the last minute to get all the patients out, causing them to miss the evacuation window.
"We rode out the storm here," Todd Leach, director of operations at UTMB, said. "A number of the Optus staff were actually on site physically with us, both a project manager and a switch technician, along with our voice services people."
Leach continued: "We actually had on site physically during the storm about 500 people that included a lot of our campus police staff, a lot of patient care professionals who had to stay till the last minute to get the patients evacuated, so that eliminated their ability to evacuate.
"And just that sheer number of people, if you don't have your basic telephone communications system, it's hard to coordinate that staff and keep them in the loop on where they're going to eat and where they're going to be housed during the storm and how they're going to get updates from senior management."
