A nurse from Akron who works in disaster zones following massive storms just returned from treating people in the Florida Keys following Hurricane Irma and now he’s on standby to help in Puerto Rico.
Jeff Anderson is a nurse with the National Disaster Medical System. A team of medical professionals assembled by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to respond to disaster zones following major weather events.
He will typically go to a city, where a hurricane is about to make landfall, wait for the storm to pass and then treat hundreds of people who no longer have access to their doctors or medications.
“I was on Typhoon Pongsona in 2002, Hurricane Charlie, Francis, Gene, Ivan,” he said.
He has been deployed as a nurse with the HHS to countless hurricane disaster areas. But what Anderson saw in the Florida Keys, following Irma, one of the strongest and largest storms in U.S. history, according to the National Hurricane Center, only compared to one other storm he’s ever seen.
“Irma was right along there with Katrina. Katrina was localized, where Irma was widespread, the whole state,” he said.
Irma decimated the Florida Keys. It killed 12 people there and the death toll is estimated to be 75 throughout the state of Florida.
But Anderson and his team likely saved many others.
“When they evacuated, everybody was gone. Doctors, pharmacists, CVS, everybody is gone,” he said.
“It’s literally a ghost town and you have patients and people who have stayed and waited out the storm or were progressively returning to the island.”
The work his team does is not very well known. His disaster medical assistance team works out of tents right at the ground zero of national disaster areas and treat hundreds of patients until they’re safe and able to return home.
“The sincere compassion and the warmth and tenderness in their eyes, that conveys a million words,” he said.
