The day before last weekend’s big blizzard, I sat in on a planning session in the foothills, where a winter storm warning forecast 2 to 4 feet of snow in Evergreen (and almost 4 feet did actually fall). The participants were making plans. Not to keep roads plowed, or grocery stores open, or electricity going, all of which are critical in a storm. They were making plans to keep people alive.
There were 20 of them around a conference table — nurses, social workers, therapists, a doctor, some volunteers, all with Evergreen-based Mount Evans Home Health Care & Hospice — and they were going over procedures to deal with more than 30 homebound patients in their care whose lives, once the storm struck, could be at risk. Some were recently released from hospitals and fighting infections. Some were incapacitated by injury or disease. Some were fighting for their lives. Some, in hospice, were waiting to die in peace.
Anyone like that is vulnerable in the best of times, but more defenseless than ever in the worst. There are patients who require critically timed injections to survive. Others need supplementary oxygen to breathe. And some depend on IVs for anything from medicine to nutrition.
Normally, the caregivers at this non-profit (full disclosure: I am a member of its board) drive out to patients’ homes. Some are in comparatively urban mountain-area neighborhoods, but others are in more remote parts of Jefferson, Clear Creek, Gilpin and Park counties. There are patients living in the back woods, on dirt roads, even without telephones.
Those conditions can be tough enough when the weather’s OK, but when it’s bad? Roads become impassable, electricity goes out, communications stop working. What do you do, then, when someone depends on you to survive but you can’t get to where they are?
That’s what this group was planning for. They instructed everyone on how to reach Flight for Life, which can drop vital medicines in emergencies to stranded patients. They talked about the Alpine Rescue Team, which usually you hear about because they’re saving mountain climbers stuck on cliffs, but which has a fleet of Sno-Cats that can climb through the drifts and deliver necessities to the most inaccessible places.
They talked about ensuring that every patient would have sufficient supplies of oxygen, and medicines, and food to sustain themselves through the snowstorm. And where patients’ conditions were just too tenuous to stay where they were, trying to arrange their transfer — before the storm was due to hit — to the care of families or friends.
The people at this pre-storm brainstorming session were operating under the radar, beyond our view. And as they were setting their strategies, dozens, probably more like hundreds of other groups in the storm’s path, were doing the same kind of thing.
At police and fire stations, at hospitals and utilities, at military bases and grocery stores and even (since I’ve made my living in a business where no day is sacred and no storm is a show-stopper) in newsrooms around Colorado and around the country, there is no day off.
Americans often complain that in the news, there’s never much good news. Maybe not, but a lot of good things still are happening every day of the year. You just don’t see them.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen is an author, public speaker, and former foreign correspondent for ABC News.
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