When Crises Collide - Strategies for Resilience Amid Confounding Threats, from Viruses to Firestorms

Wider lessons emerge through a moment captured at a Colorado hospital facing the Omicron surge and a flash firestorm

To keep track of Colorado fire impacts and to help hundreds of families who lost homes, visit the Boulder Office of Emergency Management Office of Emergency Management website.

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Sometimes, a single image captures the broadest dimensions of a turbulent moment in human history.

For me, that's the case in a photograph shot around 6:30 p.m. on December 30 by Wendy Cardona*, a registered nurse who is currently part of a surgical team at Good Samaritan Medical Center in Lafayette, Colorado. Lafayette is in Boulder County, just east of several towns and neighborhoods incinerated that day and night by what is now measured as the most destructive fire in the state's fiery history.

The photograph shows three members of the team in surgical scrubs standing at a wall-size window looking out at a glowing orange column of smoke rising into the darkening purple sky, with an ambulance and helicopter in the foreground, a cordon of incoming fire trucks and other emergency vehicles and a fourth staffer, close to the camera, illuminated by her phone as she scans social media. After it was posted on Reddit, the image flowed onto Twitter. Cardona gave me permission to post it here.

Photo of a surgical team watching the Marshall Fire, by Wendy Cardona, RN, @ridingthewendywaves

In an Instagram post of the photograph, Cardona said:

"This picture symbolizes in many ways the horror of the fires that torched through Superior and Louisville, Colorado, on December 30, 2021.

I watched in disbelief, in worry, and in sadness at the destruction of so many lives. This is going to be a long and difficult recovery for all of the lives affected. At the very minimum we can always offer compassion, understanding, and patience for one another."

Cardona has launched a GoFundMe campaign, called Project Joy.

INSERT, Jan. 5: I just hosted a Sustain What conversation with Cardona, her team partner, surgical technician Chelsea Vargas, and Lisa Dale, a Columbia expert on wildfire safety and resilience:

I interviewed Vargas and Greg Moss, vice president of communications for SCL Health, the hospital network that runs Good Samaritan.

Coping with compound calamities

To me, the scene at the hospital that evening encapsulates an awful lot for anyone who's been navigating the last two years and trying to stay safe, sane and effective amid overlapping crises.

Here are some details from the hospital, followed by some strategic advice and resources for those feeling overwhelmed.

At dusk on Thursday, about seven members of this Good Samaritan surgical team remained on duty after a long all-hands day of procedures, including transferring 55 critically-ill patients to other hospitals as a precaution (including some on ventilators because of impacts from COVID-19 infections).

Waiting for their next orders, the staffers watched the nearby conflagration consume communities closer to the grasslands to the west from which the flames had flowed at about a football-field's length a minute.

"I live right next to the hospital, so I had a little bit of peace of mind," Vargas told me. "But everybody else that I was working with was in the direct line of fire. So it was a little scary to watch them worry about their homes."

Ignited by some as-yet-undetermined human action, fanned by hurricane gusts and likely amplified by global warming, the Marshall Fire, named for its point of origin, destroyed nearly a thousand homes in the towns of Louisville and Superior and other spots around Boulder County - with many hospital employees' families literally in the line of fire out there in the spreading darkness.

Like health-care workers around the world, this team had been working long hours, at substantial personal risk, in a nonstop state of pandemic emergency and uncertainty.

And now the world was burning.

Cardona had arrived at Good Samaritan just a few weeks before the disaster, as part of the vast ever-flowing network of traveling nurses who are working overtime to fill gaps in nursing capacity around the country as the pandemic surges and shifts.

Read this Business Insider story from last February on the heavy toll the pandemic has taken on these unsung heroes of the pandemic.

Reflecting the quick cohesion that develops, Vargas, who works to maintain sterile conditions, said Cardona was her nurse partner for the day, adding, "She was the only one that kept my head on straight."

When ember-filled, 100-mile-per-hour gusts from what had started as a grass fire reached the vast amounts of wood, gas, and other urban fuels in dense neighborhoods of Louisville, Superior and several other spots, the blaze transformed within minutes from a wildfire to an urban firestorm, combusting all those homes and wrecking dozens of businesses, ranging in size from Target to Chuck-e-Cheese.

Greg Moss said the hospital was poised to do a much larger transfer of patients but the winds changed in their favor.

For others, that was not the case. "People went to work that day, or to lunch, or to get a haircut or go to Costco, and they walked out a half hour later and the sky was dark with smoke and the world was on fire," Moss said.

In my conversation with the surgical technologist Vargas, she described deep concerns about the year to come.

"I am scared that this year is going to bring on challenges," she said. "I'm definitely not ready for it. The past two years have brought challenges that I certainly wasn't ready for and I can only imagine it's going to get weirder. Health care is always getting weirder."

I asked if she had a general principle for maintaining personal resilience.

“I think the only thing that keeps me going is that we're here to help people,” she said. “And at the end of the day, that's the only thing that we do. So however we have to do that, I'll keep doing it.”

Homes gone, but lives saved

It's a testament to the preparedness and responsiveness of disaster and emergency personnel and communities across Boulder County that hospitals never had to deal with a crush of critical burn victims to add to the pressures from the enduring pandemic.

Indeed, as of today, authorities are still only counting two people missing and likely deceased.

“It’s amazing that we only took in two burn patients at Good Sams, and the numbers I’ve seen are about 40 in total,” Moss said. "When you look at the number of people who were evacuated and in harm’s way that’s a very small percentage.”

The low death count, given the ferocious intensity and speed of this fire, constitutes one of the most remarkable achievements I've seen over the last two decades tracking disasters triggered by extreme weather events.

But it also reflects a global reality - that while climate-related disasters are increasing, deaths are dropping, as the World Health Organization reported in September and I wrote about here.

Still, the devastation is massive - and has starkly jolted thousands of lives.

Just as I'm doing with my continuing coverage of the largely-avoidable death toll in the December 10-11 tornado outbreak, I'll be working hard this year to point to root causes of fire vulnerability and paths to building forward safer.

Read the tornado story

But the main goal of today's post, the first of this new year, is to step back and explore the big picture.

Just click to Reddit and sit with Cardona's photograph for a minute or two, or discuss it with a friend, then jot down how the vista relates to your own circumstances, feelings or mission as you confront the most profound meaning of the phrase "Long COVID" (it's settling in for the long haul) and threats posed by nature or, more often, ourselves.

Post your thoughts in the comment thread below.

On the Sustain What webcast on Wednesday we'll explore your reflections.

After my conversation with Wendy Cardona and Chelsea Vargas, you'll meet Brandon Clement, an Emmy-winning photojournalist and storm chaser. Clement has had a very busy few months, capturing stunning dawn vistas over the charred remains of Louisville, Colorado, just before the snow fell on New Year's Eve, and just a few weeks earlier recording a haunting overview of damage in Mayfield and Bowling Green, Kentucky, from the multi-state tornado that churned through the Southeast on December 10-11.

How to stay safe, sane and effective

I highly recommend you explore and share the insights of Susanne Moser, a veteran social scientist working to spread and deepen the capacity for people facing, or working in, long emergencies to cultivate what she calls an "adaptive mind." Read this definition and you'll see why Moser is always on my mind:

Doug Parsons recently hosted Moser on his Cimpatico webcast, saying, "She describes the psychosocial stresses that ongoing change, traumatic experiences, and transformative challenges associated with the climate crisis have on those working in the field of climate change."

Finally, here's some advice on navigating the "infodemic" around the pandemic and other disasters from an expert whose views I hold dear on how to stay safe, sane and effective.

Early in the pandemic, Jeff Schlegelmilch, the director of Columbia's National Center for Disaster Preparedness and author of "Rethinking Readiness," provided invaluable tips on my Sustain What webcast on how to manage, instead of get consumed by, information amid crises.

"There is a lot of real-time raw information coming out constantly," Schlegelmilch said. "This fire hose of information is not actionable, and may even be dangerous. If it becomes worth listening to... officials will update their guidelines. Take some time daily to review the latest information from official sources..., who will update on what the science tells us. That should be more than enough to keep you updated. We are all dealing with a tremendous amount of uncertainty. Adding more noise won't add to anything but your anxiety. Use your best judgement with the information available. And for the space in between, find ways to relax, recharge, and if you are able, help others who may be in need."

Building forward safer

I'll also be focusing this week on lessons related to another image, this one from Clement's drone video shot over Louisville, which shows that houses or other structures, if built and sited properly, can withstand even a devastating fire.

Luck can play a role, as well, of course, but this house, according to a neighbor with whom I interacted on Twitter, had fire-resistant siding. More anon.

Louisville, Colorado, at dawn after the Marshall Fire swept through (Brandon Clement video)

Correction

* I had Wendy Cardona's name wrong in the post when first published. My apologies!

Watch

Here's a Sustain What webcast I ran over the weekend with Morgan Bazilian, an expert on climate and public policy at the Colorado School of Mines, titled "Colorado Firestorm - What Happened, What Next?"

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Parting song

I usually add an image here, but instead here's a musical salve from my friend Reggie Harris - his song "We Will Not Rest," written during the unrest over the murder of George Floyd, but applicable in any turbulent time. Listen to the full song in one of my Sunday Sanity music shows here.