The Daily - Lost in the Storm, Part 2

Episode Date: September 14, 2018

Even as floodwaters caused by Hurricane Harvey began to recede, Wayne Dailey was pleading with emergency services to send someone to rescue his wife. Guests: Annie Brown, a producer for The Daily, speaks with Wayne Dailey, who sought urgent medical care for his wife during Hurricane Harvey, and Sheri Fink, who reported this story for The New York Times Magazine. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Days after Hurricane Harvey hit, even as waters began to recede, Wayne Daly was still pleading with emergency services for someone to come rescue his wife. Sherry Fink and Annie Brown tell part two of the story.

It's Friday, September 14th. We begin this hour with dire conditions in Texas. Hurricane Harvey made landfall on Friday night as a Category 4 hurricane and has pummeled Houston and the surrounding region, bringing catastrophic flooding for days. More than 30 inches of rain have fallen in parts of Houston since Thursday, and it's not over yet. The Lord's will, we will continue to be safe, continue to be dry. Like I said, about an hour ago, you couldn't see the top of my mailbox. And now I can see the top of my mailbox. So I know the water has receded at least eight inches.

But I am very fortunate. My family is very blessed right now to be alive, to be safe, to be dry. Everything else is not essential. Casey's sleeping. She didn't have a very good night last night. She's been sick, puking and stuff, so I'm just trying to keep her occupied.

All my dogs, I got all my animals in. So just to let all you guys know, there's still hope in sight. So love all you guys, everybody be careful, and I will keep y'all posted and updated. Wayne tries to assure everybody we're going to be okay. That's his word out to everybody. But in fact, it's a horrible night.

Casey, by the morning, she's just really lethargic, almost impossible to rouse. What's coming out of her mouth is gibberish. If anything, it's not even daybreak yet. And he calls 911 again. Second 911 call, Tuesday, August 29th, 6.52 a.m. How are you doing? Yes, this is Wayne Bailey.

Excuse me. Sorry. I'm sorry. My name is Wayne Bailey, and I need a water rescue. My wife is in bad shape. She had surgery last Wednesday. She had a tumor removed from her left kidney. Okay, what address? My address is... The county has disaster plans, and under the county's disaster plans, the local fire station is in charge of rescues. Okay, well, as of right now, they haven't resumed water rescue operations. They will at daylight for safety reasons. The problem is, this fire station didn't have any boats, didn't have any high-water trucks.

Some neighboring ones did, but they were busy using them in their own district. They couldn't share. So at daylight, they will resume operations, and there's multiple neighborhoods in that area that are having to be evacuated. Right. So I have your phone number for the fire department, and they will get to you as soon as possible. Okay. Thank you very much. You're welcome.

Bye-bye. So Wayne has called again. He's been assured that the rescues are going to start at daylight. Listening to the 911 tapes, it's just clear that he respects this person as an authority, and so he yields to that. But he has no idea that his call is just one of hundreds added to a long list. Nothing's really changed. His call hasn't been recategorized as an urgent medical call. It's just out there, and there's just no guarantee that help is going to come.

So many different scenarios went through my mind in those three days. What if I did this? What if I did this? What if I did this? What if I did this? What were some of the things you ruled out? Oh, well, I have an air mattress. I thought about blowing it up and getting my wife on it. And then I thought, well, no, because then something happens and we get swept away by the currents or something and then the kids lose both of us. And I was like, okay, well, that's not going to work. Everything I thought that I could do personally to help her,

it all came back to, you're better off just sit and wait. Eventually someone would come. So it's just an hour later. The sun is up. There's still no boats. They're putting wet rags on her. Wayne and the kids, they're fanning her. He's getting frantic because Casey is not waking up

and he's so, so concerned. And so he calls 911 again. Third 911 call, 8.02 a.m. Sorry, name, let's... Now, Wayne County Transfer. Go ahead, sir, and give us the address, please. It's... Enchanted Path Drive. Okay, we do already have two calls for service at this address. Okay, my wife, she's getting worse.

She's unresponsive. She's real with colorectal. She's been vomiting. She's in a lot of pain. And I'm really, really, really, really need to get her to the hospital ASAP. I understand that. The fire department is working as quickly as they can to get everybody evacuated. We currently have, I mean, thousands of calls for service in this area to get everybody out.

Okay, it's just going to take some time for them to be able to get everybody. Okay? Okay. All right. Thank you. 19 seconds into the call, the call taker just closed the call as a duplicate while they were still talking. By this time, I knew the power was out and it was hot and she was sweaty and of course she was running a fever anyways. and she's having a hard time breathing. She would stop breathing and I'd have to shake her and sometimes slap her in her face to get her to start breathing again. At this point, it's so alarming to Wayne because she's kind of trying to speak when she's coming in and out of consciousness. And then she couldn't talk at all.

It was like, it was like watching a baby trying to talk for the first time. And it was real hard to watch her go through that. And so Wayne calls 911 again, two hours after the last call. Fourth 911 call, 10.15 a.m. Hi, I'm Dillon. This is Houston Fire. I have a caller on the line for...

Enchanted Path. Okay, caller. Your first name? Wayne. Wayne, what are you reporting? My wife is in urgent need of medical attention. She had surgery last Wednesday. She had a tumor removed from her left kidney, and she's almost unresponsive.

She's been vomiting for the past two days. Can't talk. She's shaking. I need to get her doctor. Okay. All right. How was the bug stops here attitude? My wife's going to die if you don't do something.

If you don't send somebody now, my wife's going to die if you don't send somebody now. My wife's going to die today. Does she have fever? Yes, she is running a fever. Okay. All right. She has four incisions on her left side where they did the surgery, and they're looking pretty discolored too.

Finally, this is classified as a medical call, a 31, an unconscious party. The problem is there's a gap because Casey still needed to be rescued. She still needed to get out of a flood zone. And the local EMS agency, they didn't have boats or high water trucks. They didn't have their own resources to target people who had a medical emergency, but also needed to be gotten out of a flood zone. So this was a gap in the preparedness of this area. Okay. All right. We do have the call. We're getting medical to you as soon as they can get there, okay? If our condition changes, call us back. All right?

Okay. This is like the fourth time I've called. I understand. And we're trying to get to you, okay? Yes, ma'am. All right, bye-bye. And so Wayne gets really active. He grabs Casey in a bear hug and shuffles her from the bed into the living room to try to make sure that she's right by the door when rescuers come. And then a few minutes after that, I heard a helicopter outside.

And I was like, what? And I opened the door, and I seen two streets behind us. He sees a helicopter, and it's hovering over a home in his neighborhood. And the rescue line goes down, and a rescue diver on that line comes back up with somebody. They were doing an airlift rescue. I was like, oh my gosh. He sees this. He sees the helicopter, and he just

quickly goes out the back door. He's sloshing through the water. It's to his thighs. He goes over to the side of the house where he has this ladder. I'm on the roof. I had a flashlight, and I was flashing a flashlight. Clicking it on and off and on and off. Hollering and waving my arms. He's waving, waving, trying to get the attention of this helicopter.

Finally, I did, and the helicopter came over to me. It starts moving toward his trailer, and it's almost overhead, and it kind of halts there. The rescuer, he was leaned out over the side of the helicopter looking down at me, and I kept hollering as long as I can, my wife's dying, my wife's dying, I need help, I need help. She's out of here now. He's just waving, waving, and that helicopter hovers overhead.

And then it just keeps going. They just looked at me, and then they just flew off. So then I came back inside, and that's when I decided that no one's going to help us. She's going to die in this house, right there in that chair. Casey. Someone's coming to help us, okay? I love you. When I got back over here to the house,

I took a minute and ten-second video of how my wife was. Just keep breathing. He had heard that people were making false alarms. People were trying to get rescued, and so they would call 911, and they would say, I'm having an emergency. And Wayne was so frightened that he would later be accused of calling 911 inappropriately

that he actually chose to make this recording just to prove that his wife indeed was having a medical emergency. That's all I need you to do is just sit there and keep breathing. Don't try to move or anything. Just keep breathing. Okay? I wanted to have some evidence that I was not lying about how my wife was.

She can't speak. She tries to, but she can't. Her mouth is real dry and clammy. Casey, look at me. Look at me. Her eyes are, you know, dilated and Casey, you know, when you're looking at it, it looks like you're just looking through her. Casey, you know, you can't really see nothing in there. Keep breathing.

Right after I shot that video, I heard the trolling motor of a boat on my road. An aluminum boat comes into view, and he just kicked the screen door open. And I seen the little John boat, and I said, hey, y'all guys doing rescues? And they said, yeah, what you got? I said, my wife's dying, man, I need help. And they tied the boat up to the rail of the steps. As soon as I got in the house, they took one look and they said, oh my God, this woman needs help now. How long has she been like this? I said,

about two days. And they said, oh my gosh. These are just volunteers. They tell Wayne that they've been out there. They've been looking for somebody to rescue all day. And because the waters had been going down in that neighborhood, actually people didn't want to be rescued. So if they had known about him, they told him they would have been there much earlier. So they helped me get her in a boat, and then the neighborhood behind us, they had a medic there. So they took us to the medic,

and he took one look at us. This woman's fighting for her life. We need to airlift her out right now. So what they did was they took one of the boats and got her to the place where they had launched, where there were dump trucks waiting. So the idea was that dump trucks could carry a lot of people, like to a shelter, for example, if they were evacuating, and they could go through a certain amount of high water. So finally, they had somebody to help. One of the rescuers was holding the boat steady while the rest of us guys were picking Casey up to put her in the back of this dump truck. Casey was lifted onto the bed of the

dump truck, which is where the gravel goes, and Wayne hopped in beside her. I tried to get her as comfortable as possible, laying on that hard steel floor of that dump truck, holding her as steady as I could from getting bounced around because it was a rough ride. They had to try to figure out where to go, where can we get to, because there's so much flooding. So they started heading to a hospital and were told, no, the roads are closed. They were told to take us to the Kroger's at Beltway 8, because they were supposed to have a med station set up outside in the parking lot. And they get onto the freeway, they go through a little bit of water, get to this shopping mall, and there's nobody there. There's no clinic set up. The urgent care center, convenient care center was closed. They had announced it, but bad

information. So then the guys were like, what is going on? Is this a joke? There's nothing here. You know, this woman's dying. She's dying. She's going to die right here, right now if we don't get her somewhere. Where do I take her? What hospital? Where? So for the fifth time, somebody called 911 for Casey. And this time it was the dump truck driver.

Fifth 911 call, 2.49 p.m. I'm at the Memorial Convenient Care Center. All right. Next to the Kroger. Tell me what happened. We have a patient who is in septic shock. Okay. All right, are you with the patient now?

Yes. All right, I want you to get right next to her. I'm going to do a test to determine how effective she's breathing. She does pick up on the idea that Casey is very sick, and so she asked the driver if he could calculate her rate of breathing. All right. I want you to say the word now every time she takes a breath in, and don't stop till I tell you. Okay. Now. Now. Now. Now. All right.

She's breathing faster than normal, but it is affecting her. It was apparent Casey's breathing was really fast. All right. Is she still unconscious? She is. She's going in and out unconsciously. Okay. All right. We do have a call.

I guess the paramedics are going to do their best to get to you as soon as they can, but we do have over 1,000 calls for service in this area. If you guys can just maintain your airway, place your hand on her forehead and your other hand under her neck and tilt her head back. Just continue to keep her airway open. Okay. If she worsens at all, call me back through 911, okay?

Okay. Okay, thanks she worsens at all, call me back through 911, okay? Okay. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. The 911 call center dispatches an ambulance. They told them to get back on top of Beltway 8. We got told there was going to be an ambulance that was going to meet us there. They were en route and would be there within 10 minutes. The dump truck bumps back to the freeway.

And in this moment, she is just kind of there. She's not moving. She's cold. She's wet. She's dirty. Her lips were blue and purple, and her face was flushed red, and her toes were blue. And I had my head down on her chest so I could hear her heart and feel her breathing. And I'm on my knees.

And I'm scrunched up as close as I can get to her to try to keep her warm. And maybe two or three minutes had passed by since we had parked. And all of a sudden, I feel Casey grabbing my shirt and started pulling me towards her, and she pulls me close real tight, and I'm face to face with her, and I saw her, I saw Casey in her eyes, and she says, let me go, and I said, what are you talking about, let you go, what the hell are you talking about, and she goes, let me go, and I said said the ambulance is right here just hold on and just keep breathing the ambulance is right here she and she goes i love you let me go and then she just started puking this nasty stuff up and she stopped breathing and then there's no heartbeat

and uh and so i beat on the side of the dump truck and got the driver's attention i said hey she's dying right now man she's dying right now, man. She's dying right now. And he jumped over the back of the dump truck from the driver's side of the dump truck and wiped her face off and started CPR. So it's 3.16 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon. It has been 26 hours, almost 26 hours, since Wayne first called 911 saying Casey needed to get to a hospital,

and the ambulance finally arrives. The paramedics think because she was speaking just a few minutes before that and CPR was started right away that they might be able to get her back. They take over performing CPR. They put her on a machine that can do that better. They put a tube down her throat to give her oxygen.

They give her doses of epinephrine, doses of atropine, these drugs that are part of trying to get somebody's heart to start again, and then take her to the hospital. And the hospital tries in the emergency room, they try to bring her back more doses of medicine, more CPR.

But after more than 45 minutes of these efforts, they conclude that nothing more can be done. And they pronounce her dead. They cleaned her up and they told me I could go in and see her. I did. I mean, I didn't want to, but I did because I knew she wasn't there. You know, it was just her vessel. And so I went in there and, you know, I gave her a kiss on her forehead and told her I loved her and told her I was sorry. And then I had to leave. I couldn't stay there no more.

Why did you apologize? Because it was too late. I couldn't stay there no more. Why did you apologize? Because it was too late. I couldn't get her there in time. It's like I didn't do enough. And then after everything, you know, we went through of getting out and getting there, you know, it was too late. So here's what we learned about why Casey died. I think people just assumed she had a really bad infection after surgery. But the official cause of death was something called pulmonary emboli, which are blood clots,

which in this case form in the legs and traveled up into the circulation and blocked a really important blood vessel leading to her lungs. But we had some medical experts look at her case, and they pointed out something very important. Casey was already at risk for these blood clots because of her Cushing syndrome, because she had recently had surgery. But there was also a mistake. She was sent home without a crucial medication. It's a steroid called cortisol.

And without this medication, Casey developed all those symptoms we saw, the vomiting, the pain, the lethargy. The fact that she stayed in bed and got dehydrated put her at even higher risk for those deadly blood clots. But here's the real kicker. If Casey had been able to get to a hospital more quickly, if Wayne's calls for help would have been answered more quickly, she could have had treatment and had every chance of surviving. It seemed like every avenue that was there, for whatever reason, was unaccessible. Who do you blame for what happened? I don't know where to put a blame at, to be honest with you. I mean, yeah, I want to blame the doctor.

Yeah, I want to blame the system. I want to blame somebody for taking responsibility for what happened, you know. No one can put a blame on besides the weather, you know, the system itself, you know. I mean, if they would have just sent somebody out, if they would have just did the job like the job was meant to be done, like protocol calls for, then something might have went different. I don't know. So when I set out to report on this story, which was, you know, a year ago, just after Hurricane Harvey, I wanted to understand the system. How is it supposed to work? And why didn't it work here? What were the steps?

Was it one thing that could be fixed? Was it several things? I wanted to really like almost forensically go in and look. And then I found along the way that just about every link in this chain fails. First of all, getting through to 911, Wayne does. But the 911 call centers are so overwhelmed that they had stopped categorizing the calls so that Wayne's call just went into a long list that went to the fire department of people needing rescue. The local fire department didn't have boats, even though they were in charge of rescue in a flood zone. So they had to work with volunteers who showed up, and they just didn't happen to be working in Wayne and Casey's neighborhood.

Then finally, that fourth call gets through. Finally, Casey's condition is recognized as a medical emergency. So that call gets sent to the emergency medical services. But the EMS agency doesn't have its own boat. So again, they have to call the fire department, which isn't available, isn't working in Wayne and Casey's area. So then the EMS agency has to turn to the county to see if there are any county, state, or federal search and rescue teams or boats or helicopters available. And at that moment, all these hours later, they weren't available.

So if the 911 system had been modernized, as everybody's known that it's needed to be for so long, if the fire department had boats at its disposal, if the emergency medical services had its own dedicated high-water truck, which they now have approval to buy, so many investments that could have been made earlier. But none of that existed in this case. And so instead, she waited too long. And one year after this happened, what's your life like now?

My life is a little empty. I got one paddle on one side of the boat and I'm trying to go straight, but you know, we go a little circle here, a little circle there, and I keep switching my paddle side to side. Slowly but surely, you know, getting it straight. Casey was, she took care of a lot of things, and one of those was finances, and it's been really tough. The day before the anniversary of Casey's death, his truck was repossessed. He had a few more payments on it and thought he was up to date,

but apparently not, and his water was shut off. Again, you know, issues with the payments and the utility. And they always struggled with money. But Casey was a pretty good money manager. And I think it's Okay, guys. I just want to thank everybody for their love and support. It means so much to me. Excuse me. I know I put a post up after all this happened with a Pearl Jam song called Just Breathe. And my wife, Casey, she used to always, she didn't want to hear that version. She wanted to hear me sing it. So I've never done this before, guys.

This is my first time to ever do anything like this before. So I'm going to sing Just Breathe for my wife. Well, right after she had passed, I made a fool of myself on Facebook live, singing the song. Actually, I wasn't really singing. I had the earbuds in, and I couldn't tell. I thought I was singing, but I was just really mumbling. singing about i was just really mumbling stay with me oh let's just breathe i'm sorry guys my mom was calling i I'll do this in just a minute. Let me talk to my mom, and I'll get right on and do this.

All right? I'll be right back. I'll be right back. Sherry Fink first reported this story for the Times Magazine. After Hurricane Harvey, the county medical examiner's office listed just 36 deaths as storm-related, office, listed just 36 deaths as storm-related, all of which were caused directly by drowning, falls in floodwaters, and electrocutions. To this day, Casey's death is not included in Hurricane Harvey's official toll. In interviews, EMS officials said they believed at least four or five other people in the district who called 911 died when they were not rescued in time.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Watch out, buddy. Wow, incredible. This house, this house is taking a lot of water on the first level already. The outer bands of Hurricane Florence,

which was downgraded to a Category 2 storm, made landfall in the Carolinas on Thursday afternoon, packing winds of up to 100 miles per hour. It's coming in here. Oh, my gosh! Oh, my gosh!

Oh, my gosh, there's like a four-foot wave just hit me. A four-foot wave just hit me. Just knocked everything down. Look at this. It's destroying everything. The storm is expected to slow dramatically as it moves inland, dumping as much as 40 inches of rain and creating storm surges that could reach 13 feet. The National Hurricane Center has warned that flooding from both the storm surge and rainfall could be catastrophic. Thank you. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher. Our engineer is Chris Wood.

And our theme music is by Jim Rundberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Michaela Bouchard, and Stella Tan. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.