In the days leading up to Hurricane Helene, Dr. Lisa Kaufmann worked around the clock to make sure her North Carolina hospital system was as prepared as possible, stockpiling supplies like water, food, medication and equipment.
But nearly a week after the storm’s ferocious floodwaters destroyed so much of the western part of the state, Kaufmann, the chief medical officer for UNC Appalachian Regional Healthcare System’s three hospitals, said they’re now dealing with another crisis.
Forty-two hospital employees are still unaccounted for, unable to be reached by phone and possibly stuck in places that are inaccessible.
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“We think most of them are probably OK,” Kaufmann said. “They just have no communications, but we don’t know and so, it is very stressful for everybody who’s working here in any capacity.”
While many health care workers are accustomed to stress, those in the disaster zone say it’s now being compounded by their new reality.
Hannah Drummond, a registered nurse at Mission Health in Asheville and the chief representative for National Nurses United, the union that represents nurses there, said it’s been an emotional roller coaster.
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“There are moments that we have where we’re able to cope and compartmentalize and focus on the patient, and there were moments where somehow we’ve been able to joke and laugh and then there are other moments where we’re hugging each other, choking back our tears,” Drummond said.
She said watching her colleagues band together and help each other has been positive, but with her beloved town destroyed and people still missing, it’s taking an emotional toll.
“We still have co-workers that we haven’t heard from,” Drummond said. “With the patient load finally dying down, there are people going out to their addresses because we haven’t been able to get a hold of them to check and see if they’re OK.”
“It’s just like, do you not have cell service or are you dead?” she added.
Of High Country Community Health’s 13 clinics, only nine are operational after the storm. At first, they couldn’t get in contact with many of their staff members, said Alice Salthouse, the clinics’ founder and chief executive officer.
“It was sickening,” Salthouse said. “It’s like you have people that you work with and that you spend about as much time with them as you do your family. And we work together. We’re a team, and there was a lot of concern.”
But after four days of nonstop calls and texts, there was relief and joy as they finally made contact with all 220 employees.
“We just whenever we would say, ‘Oh, we got a hold of Vicky,’ and everybody would do a high five and almost do cartwheels,” Salthouse said.
Kaufmann said the number of employees unaccounted for at UNC Appalachian was much higher immediately after the storm. Nearly 50% of the 1,600 employees were unreachable, she said. So, she got creative, enlisting the marketing team to use social media to call on all employees to check in and let them know if they were safe.
“That number started exploding with calls from employees who were trying to call in because they wanted people to know, ‘I’m OK’ and ‘This is my status on whether I can get through to report to work’ and so forth,” Kaufmann said. “We were able to get hold of a lot of people.”
But as the days go by and dozens of employees remain unaccounted for, Kaufmann said she’s staying positive and channeling her stress and anxiety into figuring out how to find them.
“People are reaching out to people if they know someone who is a neighbor,” she said. “The search-and-rescue people also have names of people that are known to be not accounted for and as they are sweeping the counties, house by house, they’re making their way through the jungle of overturned trees to actually check on everybody.”
