Stanford hurricane relief efforts

Brandon Bond, administrative director of the Office of Emergency Management for Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, recently joined hurricane relief efforts in Florida and St. Thomas. The following news article, originally published by Stanford Healthcare on Sept. 14, 2017, details assistance rendered by Bond and other members from the Stanford team.

In the aftermath of the recent devastating hurricanes, several representatives from Stanford Health Care have stepped up to help in relief efforts. Bond is pictured above helping evacuate dialysis patients in St. Thomas.

Colin Bucks, MD, pictured to the right with Bill Mulkerin, MD in Emergency Medicine, with FEMA Urban Search & Rescue CA Task Force 3 returning from Florida, provided the below statement to capture his team’s relief efforts in southern Florida:

“We completed a marathon convoy to move our task force by road from California to Eglin Air Force base in Northern Florida. Once in Florida, we staged for two days. While we waited for our assignment we refined our plans, worked on our cache, and completed extra training. We were one of four USAR teams staged at Eglin chomping at the bit for an assignment, but the search work in Southern Florida went to other teams. All four task forces at Eglin were demobilized. We started our return road trip early this afternoon.

I’m glad we got activated. I wish we got the call to perform directly, but I’m happy for the state that not all of the mustered resources were needed to gain control of this disaster. I’d far rather be in this situation than facing an overwhelmed and under-resourced scenario. Or worse yet, I’d hate to be sitting at home watching events unfold without an adequate response.

For our team, this mobilization provided an excellent opportunity to test new technologies and response protocols that would difficult to validate in anything other than a real-life event,” Bucks said.