It’s remarkable how often this happens. In February 2022, the residents of Austin, 100 miles to the east of Camp Mystic, woke up with orders to boil their water because the system’s manager feared the water was contaminated. The crisis, which lasted for three days, was caused by “errors from our operating staff,” as the manager later explained.
The mistake happened overnight when one of the employees forgot to turn off a process to take lime out of the system. Managers didn’t discover the problem until the next morning — and then didn’t warn citizens for another 12 hours.
Four years earlier, amid growing tensions between North Korea and the United States, terrified residents of Hawaii woke up to a cellphone warning: “Ballistic Missile Threat Inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.” In fact, it was a drill, an official for the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency later said. “Someone clicked the wrong thing on the computer” during an early-morning shift change on a weekend.
This is a global problem. In 1986, the operators of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union began a safety test that went horribly wrong. As the test started, a power surge hit the reactor, which exploded and blew a radioactive fireball into the darkness. The reactor melted down and set fire to a nearby reactor as well, in the largest-ever nuclear plant disaster. That was all because of engineering mistakes, including the removal of control rods, which was a violation of safety rules, by a night shift that didn’t have the experience or instructions telling them how to run the test. That test began at 1:23 a.m.
America’s own worst nuclear accident, at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island in 1979, also began with a series of nighttime mistakes by plant operators. When they lost the water pumps used to cool the reactor, they took moves that only made things worse. Half of the core melted. A hydrogen bubble built up inside the reactor, and state officials feared that it might explode. Hydrogen is tremendously explosive — a hydrogen explosion, after all, had brought down the airship Hindenburg. Plans to evacuate a large area emerged. The accident happened at 4 a.m.
There’s a common thread that runs through all these cases. Facilities managers and their communities are most vulnerable to disasters that strike in the middle of the night. Late-night shifts and holiday weekends never attract the top tier of workers, but every worker at every time needs to be trained and ready to be a first-rate first responder.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, an enlisted man at the National Guard’s headquarters in the Jackson Barracks looked out the window in the early hours of the morning and saw water coming down the street. The staff thought they had dodged the worst of the storm, but the rising water was the clue that the levees had just failed. The front-line soldier told his commanding officer, and the guard swung into action.
The waters kept rising, destroying the guard’s communications equipment. Fortunately, across the city, “everyday Louisianans stepped up and saved fellow Louisianans,” historian Douglas Brinkley wrote for Smithsonian Magazine. “There was no magic U.S. cavalry coming to the rescue.”
Just a few weeks ago, as the waters became a torrent in the middle of the night outside one cabin at Camp Mystic, a counselor rousted the young girls. They couldn’t get out through the door so she broke a window, pushed the girls out, and told them to hang onto a clothesline outside. They all were safe. But it never should have come to that.
The National Weather Service had been sending out alerts the previous day and had begun sending out increasingly urgent ones at 1:14 a.m., almost three-and-a-half hours before the river surged into the camp and other low-lying areas in the county. At 4:22 a.m., a local volunteer firefighter asked for a CodeRED Alert, to warn residents of what was coming. It took the county almost six hours to send out the alert. By that point, rescuers were already looking frantically for victims — and even that alert only reached people who had already signed up for the system.
It's a great example of what a friend of mine, who runs homeland security at a large university, told me. In his training program, he gives everyone the same piece of advice: "When you see storms brewing outside your window, don't wait for me to give instructions. You will know what to do." That’s as true at 4 in the morning as it is at 4 in the afternoon. And it’s as true for backup personnel as it is for front-liners.
Disaster response requires making every team member, even the second string, a member of the A-team.
