SAN ANTONIO — The Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council (STRAC) is the state's disaster medical response team. With less than 72 hours until Beryl hits the Texas coast, they're preparing to provide whatever medical assistance is needed.
"During a hurricane, all roads lead to San Antonio, and this has been the way since Katrina, because we're just enough inland," said Jordan Ghawi, Chief Strategy Officer for STRAC. "We're protected for most of the storm, and it's a great point for us to roster all of our ambulances, all of our disaster medical components into one area."
A few days ago, STRAC started meeting virtually with area hospitals to begin discussing plans. Already patients from the coast have begun moving to San Antonio.
"Think more of your NICU patients or complex medical patients that might need a higher level of care," Ghawi said. "There are a limited number of patients being evacuated from some of these areas into the San Antonio market. We're able to load balance these patients across the many hospitals in San Antonio so that not one facility is overburdened and we're able to maintain any elective surgeries that have been scheduled."
Now the team of hospital decision-makers and STRAC will be staffed 24/7. Ambusses, and mobile medical units are all ready to go. If needed, they will serve as mini hospitals.
"Local EMS may have their resources overwhelmed, at which point we get to come in with our ambulances from across the state of Texas to help augment what the locals have," Ghawi said. "We roster these people up from across the state of Texas. You can have a Lubbock ambulance that's going to be down in Corpus Christi transporting a loved one or helping to evacuate a hospital. This is really about Texans helping Texans."
It's a complex plan, with a history of working to make sure Texas is prepared for any disaster.
"Texas is always going to lean forward to make sure that we have the right assets in place," Ghawi said. "We'd rather lean too far forward and not be lean far enough so we will modify our response as it's needed to meet the threat of this storm."