From 9/11 to 2017 hurricanes, Vancouver nurse has been on…a path to disaster.
Raelene Jarvis has responded to a lot of national disasters, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.
But the Vancouver nurse didn’t experience a disaster first-hand until a couple of weeks ago. As part of a federal medical team, she looked out her hotel window and watched Hurricane Maria shred the capital of Puerto Rico.
“Being there during a hurricane was unusual,” said Jarvis, whose team had arrived in San Juan a few days earlier. It meant that “I’d be able to go to work immediately. I didn’t have to travel.”
The most recent activation had another distinction for Jarvis, who has been part of the federal National Disaster Medical System for 16 years. It involved three different hurricanes and was a monthlong mobilization, twice the length of a typical assignment.
She was deployed on Aug. 30 to Dallas, where she awaited an assignment after Hurricane Harvey. Then the team was redirected to another hurricane hot spot, and flew to Puerto Rico to assess the island’s medical needs after Hurricane Irma.
“We worked with the evacuation of patients from the U.S. Virgin Islands who were medically fragile,” she said. “Most of my direct care was with dialysis patients.
“We screened patients at the San Juan airport. Then we helped move patients to the convention center, which was turned into a shelter run by the Puerto Rico Department of Health.”
In the midst of their work, another hurricane warning was sounded.
“Maria was heading directly at San Juan,” Jarvis said. “So 100 to 110 patients were moved from the shelter to the airport, for transport to the (U.S.) mainland.”
Jarvis said she didn’t fear for her safety when Hurricane Maria roared into town.
“I’m not a big risk-taker. I knew I would be safe. I was with a Disaster Medical Assistance Team, in a safe hotel. When the storm peaked, we moved into the hallway,” Jarvis said.
Most of the time, she watched the storm through her fifth-floor window while thinking, “Wow! Mother Nature is powerful!”
“I watched the street in front of the hotel flood. A lot of trees went over. I watched a piece of the hotel roof fall and land on the glass roof that covered the lobby.”
The following day, she and other team members were assigned to do hospital assessments.
“We drove through town. Anything that had been up was down. Billboards were all gone. Trees were down everywhere, including big trees across the highways.”
There were even more formidable roadblocks: “Ten big concrete poles across the highway. They needed heavy machinery to get them moved.
“Everywhere you looked, streetlights were down. We were driving under wires and over wires, which was a little spooky.”
And there was water.
“We drove on flooded roads in a Kia. They hadn’t thought about that” when renting vehicles ahead of the storm, Jarvis said. “Later, they got Jeeps and vans.”
While the team experienced occasional power outages when the generator overheated, and cellular service was mostly down, “I had it easy,” she said. “So many people had it so much worse. I saw people who needed water and power.”
Puerto Rico’s recovery problems have been discussed at great length, but Jarvis said her ground-level assignment didn’t provide any perspective on breakdowns in the system.
“I don’t know where things got disconnected,” she said.
Jarvis returned home on Sept. 30 and was back at her regular job a couple of days later. She manages the urgent care clinic at Kaiser Permanente’s Longview-Kelso Medical Office.
“My bosses have been very supportive” of her federal duties, she said.
Jarvis is one of 5,000 professionals in the National Disaster Medical System. There are about 50 state-based teams in the system.
“We have about 100 doctors, paramedics and nurses on the Oregon team. Not all 100 are deployed at once. Twelve to 14 can be deployed as a task force, or they can be mobilized in teams as small as six.”
They are on call three or four times a year.
In 2001, Jarvis was working at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland when a doctor invited her to join the disaster response team. Her first assignment was 9/11.
Earlier in her career, Jarvis had worked for 16 years in a burn unit in Norfolk, Va. That turned out to be an in-demand specialty following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
“The burn unit at New York-Presbyterian Hospital was overloaded. They needed burn nurses.”
Commercial flights were grounded after the attacks, so Jarvis couldn’t leave immediately. She and two nurses from North Carolina arrived about 10 days after the disaster, relieving two volunteers from upstate New York who’d been able to drive into the city.
Their patients weren’t limited to people who made it out of the Twin Towers before they collapsed.
“One woman was outside, and it was raining down flaming jet fuel on her.”
Sixteen years later, Jarvis, 58, says she will stay on the team as long as she can meet the physical requirements. Those include walking a mile in 30 minutes while carrying a 25-pound pack. (Or 10 percent of your body weight, Jarvis said. “We’ve had some 110-pound people.”)
Team members know they might wind up roughing it, since each one has to bring a personal bag with a three-day supply of food, water and gear.
“I worry about my physical capabilities,” she said. “I try to stay healthy. I don’t want to be a burden to the team.”
There also is an emotional component to the assignments.
“I left a piece of my heart in Puerto Rico,” Jarvis said. “Basically everybody I met, I’m worried about them.”
Jarvis foresees a difficult day down the road, but it won’t involve responding to a disaster.
“It’s going to be hard the day I don’t do it,” she said. “At this point I’m not ready to stop.”
