One veterinarian’s story of the road to recovery
by Lindsey Oechsle
“It’s been a good year so far,” says Dr. Ken Diestler of Galveston’s Broadway Animal Clinic. When I sat down with him in Dallas this past October, I didn’t recognize him at first. He was sporting a new Ike-inspired handsome grey beard, but his warm smile is unmistakable. Unfortunately, his comment on the year is uttered facetiously. While the rest of the world watched Hurricane Ike wreak havoc on the coast of Galveston from living rooms and recliners, Dr. Diestler watched it firsthand from his clinic on the island’s seawall. His story begins devastatingly.
“My wife was diagnosed with brain cancer in February. Since surgery, she’s been doing chemotherapy treatments about once a month where she stays in the hospital a few days and feels pretty poorly a few days following treatment.”
The Monday of the week the storm came, Dr. Diestler dropped his wife off at the hospital and picked her up that Thursday evening. The timing couldn’t have been much worse, as most of the people that were leaving Galveston Island were evacuating that Wednesday. “Thursday night, coming back from the Methodist Hospital in Houston, there wasn’t a whole lot of traffic coming into the island,” he says with a chuckle. “So that was the good part.”
Dr. Diestler keeps up with several weather sites on the internet, and in anticipation of Hurricane Ike, the Diestler’s were paying special attention to the news. He went out to check the water levels where they live on the West end of the Island, to see whether they were going to decide to stay at home, at the clinic or get out of town. He awoke early Friday morning to check weather updates and water depths again, and after collecting his information, he woke his wife Beth— who is also a veterinarian, but no longer working due to her health—and said, “We need to get out of here.”
They started gathering their things for evacuation, packed up their cats and dogs, and got out of Galveston around 9 in the morning. Even at that time, water was starting to fill up the island, but it was coming from the backside. They found themselves pushing through water a couple feet deep and witnessed spectacular waves crashing onto the seawall straight up into the air, but the water was coming in from the Bay and filling up the island from that direction.
“I doubt that anyone who left much after we did got off the island,” said Diestler. A neighbor of theirs attempted to go one direction at about the same time the Diestler’s were evacuating, and their truck was flooded. With no choice but to abandon their truck, which they lost, the neighbors waded through waist-deep water to get away from it.
The Diestler’s made it out of town and headed for Conroe to stay with some friends. The electricity went out Friday night, and the following morning, Dr. Diestler got into his truck and headed back toward the island. He encountered several roadblocks, passing one on the inbound side, but once he got closer to the island at the Bayou Vista area, he found himself at the end of a bumper-to-bumper backup of cars and trucks. The problem wasn’t that they weren’t allowing anyone to pass, but rather that the road inbound to Galveston was impassable. The road itself was covered in all kinds of boats and debris left in the wake of Ike’s destruction. Officials turned everyone around, and Dr. Diestler headed back up to LaMarque, but the only vehicles getting through that checkpoint were entering the exit ramp and getting on the Interstate towards the opposite direction. The northbound lane was housing southbound traffic. Officials had cleared enough debris away to open one lane into Galveston, but it was on the outbound side.
In situations like this, panic is the obvious response, but as Dr. Diestler describes, patience is a virtue. Officials were limiting the amount of traffic back onto the island, allowing only groups of emergency vehicles and designated individuals through. Dr. Diestler remained patient and talked to the police officer manning the checkpoint, but he wasn’t allowed to pass. He tried to get in touch with one of the lieutenants he knows in Galveston, and waited through impossible cellular signals for a return call. Finally, the checkpoint guard, feeling empathetic for Dr. Diestler’s mission, let him tag along behind a small group of cars that were being led in by a policeman. As they drove toward the island, he recalls understanding why no one was entering on the inbound side.
“I don’t know how many boats were stacked up. The people who watched it on television probably know better than I, but there were hundreds, I imagine. Big boats, all kinds of boats stacked up on the road and in the median.”
Dr. Diestler’s clinic is located on Broadway, which if you aren’t familiar with the island, is one of the main drags to the seawall. I-45 turns into Broadway going into Galveston, divided by a median. Once Dr. Diestler got into town, everyone allowed onto the island did their best to simply get where they needed to go. Though he describes it calmly, it sounds terrifically chaotic.
“You would go a couple of blocks down Broadway, and there would be trees across the street prompting you to cross and travel on the wrong side of the road. You would have to navigate through extremely deep water and navigate around fallen wires or whatever obstacles you were faced with.” He describes the challenge as somewhat of a ‘make-do’. “However you could get to where you were going … that’s the way you had to go.”
Once he got down to the clinic on 7th and Broadway, he was relieved to find it still standing. Wednesday before the storm—once it became evident that Ike was traveling west toward the island—Dr. Diestler and his associates put up pre-cut boards on the windows of his clinic. Anytime storms like this hit, the majority of the clinic’s business in pre-storm conditions consists of tranquilizers and sedatives for those animals that people evacuate with that are not as well-behaved as people would like them to be. The work for this storm would prove to be much different.
As soon as Dr. Diestler confirmed that he still had a clinic, he surveyed the building to make sure it was still intact. Built in 1906, his 5,000 sqft. clinic is what he describes as “a big old brick house that has been there for a little over 100 years.” It has seen some storms in its day. Thankfully, the clinic sits on a higher level of Galveston, and once he entered he was pleased to see that the inside had not flooded. Tiles were torn off the roof by wind gusts and shutters were blown off, but the clinic was more or less still intact.
Unfortunately, as Dr. Diestler observed on his drive into the island, the animal shelter in Galveston didn’t fare quite as well. It was flooded, smashed in and seemingly completely wrecked. The shelter had about eight animals that couldn’t be evacuated, so those animals were housed at his clinic.
When Dr. Diestler arrived at the clinic, he wasn’t alone. Lucy Click, his most senior employee that has worked with him for about 20 years was already onsite. Lucy has an elderly mother who lives with her, whom her sister helped evacuate before the storm. Lucy’s son works at the County Sherriff’s Office and was slated to work at the jail during the storm, so Lucy decided to stay. Part way through the storm, flooding had begun, and Lucy’s son borrowed one of the County vehicles to retrieve Lucy from her house, which already had several feet of water in it. They kicked in the door of a two-story house across the street where Lucy went upstairs and braved storm through the night. The next morning, she went down to the clinic and began picking up strays and getting things in order.
For the several days following his return, Dr. Diestler and Lucy worked tirelessly collecting stray animals wandering the island and housing animals that were being delivered. Saturday night, Lucy and Dr. Diestler stayed at the clinic together, and they would get up around sunrise each morning to start walking the dogs, feeding the cats, and cleaning. While Lucy did the majority of this work, Dr. Diestler would head out in his truck to see what animals he could rescue.
As the days passed, Dr. Diestler and Lucy would visit Lucy’s home, which was ravaged by the storm, to attempt to salvage anything they could. Every morning, despite the fact that her house was in ruins, Dr. Diestler would pick Lucy up from her house and bring her back to the clinic to help. And every day when he would pick her up, there would be more of her belongings hung out on the fence or tree branches to dry. It is clear in his eyes that Dr. Diestler is impressed by, grateful for and in awe of Lucy’s dedication and resilience.
During disastrous storms, The San Luis Hotel, which is apparently built like a fortress, becomes the seawall’s haven and houses ‘central personnel’. The director of Galveston’s animal shelter stayed through the storm on the seawall at The San Luis, and Dr. Diestler began communication with her. They would coordinate efforts, and she would relay information received from the city meetings.
Several days after the storm, an abundance of animal shelter and humane society assistants appeared on the island from Houston, Louisiana, California and Missouri in RV’s and trailers, and they set up a temporary shelter in an old police annex. It was manpower-intense, with wire cages lined along hallways. A few volunteers from that group came to assist Lucy and Dr. Diestler in taking care of the animals at the clinic. About 10 days in, some of the other clinic employees who had evacuated with their children and families began to return.
The city had set in place a 6:00pm curfew, whereby all occupants on the island had to be stationary until the next morning. It was in those stationary moments that Dr. Diestler had some time to reflect on the situation at hand. In the evenings, Dr. Diestler would sit up on the small clinic deck, watching police cars go by, and he would attempt to make notes as to what he had done each day.
After a couple of days, PODs, or points of distribution, had been established, and Dr. Diestler would collect bottled water, which he had none of—or electricity for that matter—for two weeks. When the city turned the water on for two days, he remembers understanding how much we take water for granted, as it was a welcome two-day reprieve from stagnant toilets and unwashed faces.
The clinic had one generator to start with, which worked for about two days until it broke. Dr. Diestler’s nephew purchased two generators in Dallas and drove them down to a friend of Dr. Diestler’s, who then brought them onto the island Monday morning. That allowed the clinic to run the refrigerator, lights for kennels, and the freezer, where they stored animals they had euthanized. Once things settled down after the storm, Dr. Diestler decided to wire his breaker boxes to where he can plug the generator in for better electric control.
“The generator will only run so much electricity, depending on what size generator you get. But with it wired differently, you can turn all the breakers off and turn on the lights that you want to use … for future storms that hopefully won’t come.”
Some pet owners left their animals behind, assuming that they would evacuate for a day or two and return. However, given the scale of this storm, after several days had passed without returning to the island, pet owners began to call the humane society volunteers saying, “I left my animal at this address.” Volunteer responders would then break into houses to retrieve the abandoned animals.
The total dogs and cats shipped off the island came to around an excess of 800 animals. In attempts to lessen future confusion, Dr. Diestler decided to keep all identified or micro-chipped animals local and housed them at his clinic. Only the unidentifiable ones were shipped to be identified later. For animals that were sick or injured, humane society vets handled initial treatment, but the animals were usually sent over to Dr. Diestler’s clinic for further care. With generator power, he was able to run IVs through the pumps, and a few animals were stabilized there. “So, we did some good for some of the animals,” he humbly summarized.
Dr. Diestler, always with a positive mentality, added that the storm actually saved the lives of some animals on the island that suffered from chronic illnesses. They were being ignored for years, and the storm caused someone to show up and notice them. Dr. Diestler himself ended up after the storm with two more dogs that he now calls his own.
“One is a big, enthusiastic blind pit bull, and he just runs around and bumps into everything, but he’s a happy guy. The other is an old, mangy black dog that has about 20 percent of the hair that she should have and mammary glands that almost lag on the ground from numbers of litters, but after a little food and some medicine, she’s a happy dog that likes everybody. We’ll probably keep those two and either try to find them a decent home or justify their presence by calling them blood donors or something,” he says, careful to not take the situation too seriously.
Today, months after the storm, business at Dr. Diestler’s clinic is back to about two-thirds of what it was before Ike’s destruction. Frustration and confusion still exist on the island, fueled by the problems that occur when multiple representatives from different levels of government—FEMA, State of Texas, County of Galveston, City of Galveston and more—try to co-exist. Not only is it unclear who is in charge, but possibly more importantly, no one agrees on who is supposed to pay. In one of the most recent developments, the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB)—the largest employer in Galveston City and County—has just been hit with a layoff of 3,800 people, which amounts to about one third of their work force. Although several businesses on the island have reopened, many will remain closed.
“We’re still trying to get a feel as what to expect for the 6-12 month time frame,” says Dr. Diestler. “I guess we will just see how it develops."
