Hurricane Harvey Oral History Project

Shelby Gonzalez

HIST 5370

December 9, 2017

Hurricane Harvey Oral History Collection

PROJECT TITLE: “Hurricane Harvey Oral History Project”

NARRATOR: Dr. Kelly Quintanilla

DATE OF INTERVIEW: November 6, 2017

INTERVIEWER NAME: Shelby Gonzalez

DATE and LOCATION OF ITNERVIEW: Dr. Quintanilla’s office, Corpus Christi Hall at A&M University-Corpus Christi, Texas.

President of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC), Dr. Kelly Quintanilla is one of many persons being interviewed for the “Hurricane Harvey Oral History Project” being conducted by Graduate Students in good standing in the History Master’s Program at TAMU-CC. Dr. Quintanilla explains to us the policies and procedures she followed to prepare the university and students for the possibility of Hurricane Harvey making in Corpus Christi, Texas.

This project was turned into the Hurricane Harvey Oral History Collection, which explores, uncovers, and highlights the lives of residents from South Texas who experienced Hurricane Harvey. The collection was created in an effort to ensure that the memories of those affected by the hurricane not be lose, and to augment the Mary and Jeff Bell Library’s Special Collections and Archives Department records. The collections contains interviews from residents of Port Aransas, the President of TAMU-CC,… (will be continued)

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Dr. Kelly Quintanilla Narrator

Shelby L. Gonzalez History Graduate Program Interviewer

November 6, 2017 At Dr. Quintanilla’s office Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi Corpus Christi, Texas

SG: Today is November 6, 2017. I am here with the Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi President, Dr. [Kelly] Quintanilla. We are going to talk about Hurricane Harvey [August 17, 2017 – September 3, 2017] and how she helped prepare the university for it. For starters, have you ever experienced a hurricane before Hurricane Harvey?

KQ: Yes, I was here for Hurricane Bret [August 22, 1999], which was a much smaller hurricane – compared to Hurricane Harvey – and then I was here for Hurricane Rita [September 18,2005 – September 26, 2005] which did not actually hit us [Corpus Christi, Texas], but we had a mandatory evacuation; so I evacuated for it. This would be my third hurricane experience, but Hurricane Harvey was the first one that actually hit us, and was more impactful.

SG: Okay, so you were more or less prepared in a sense, for yourself not so much for the university?

KQ: Well, I was here at the university for all three of those. I have been here a very long time, twenty-four years [Laughter].

SG: How did you first hear about the hurricane?

KQ: Well, because I am part of the Incident Command Team for the university, we receive tracking on all weather, particularly hurricane related whether, every storm that comes in, every warning. As the storms are coming toward landfall, no matter where you are at, you get frequent updates. At one point, it was about every fifteen minutes. We are constantly tracking storms or any heavy whether that might affect the campus. As the hurricane started moving, we noticed it coming more toward Corpus Christ.

SG: Could you walk me through the process of preparing the university for the hurricane?

KQ: We work on this all time. All of the folks that are on the Incident Command Team go through an online Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] training. Every year we also do hurricane drills, working on our readiness and making sure everything is in place. When I was Dean, we had something called “Islander Ready,” which helped us make sure we were prepared. As Provost, I was over the academic side, with academic preparedness. As Provost, you are “Deputy Commander.” Interestingly, as President – and this is maybe something we change – the CFO [Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration, Mr. Terry Tatum] is actually the “Incident Commander” in the old structure. This may change a bit, because it seemed very weird for me not to be the person technically in charge. I was still a part of all the decision making though.

SG: Would you say that was a problem that you were not the one making the direct decisions?

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KQ: Luckily, the CFO and I were together the whole time. So when we made the decision to close campus, we were actually in College Station. We had to go up there for a Board of Regents meeting and we were monitoring the whole time. I actually sent [Terry Tatum] back early, because the team here was meeting and we had conference called in. [Terry Tatum] and I worked together on everything. Technically in the FEMA structure, when the “Incident Commander” is in place that is the only person who is in charge, but that was not an issue at all. It definitely felt a little odd to me though, so we are going to work through that for next time.

SG: Okay. What was some of the check points that you had to do in order to evacuate the campus?

KQ: Each hurricane drill we do is when the university would evacuate. When we were in College Station, Terry Tatum and I sat down and looked at everything. To me, it was a pretty easy decision because what I saw was that this hurricane was hitting Texas. Student were not here already, it was literally going to be “Move-in Weekend” when the hurricane was going to hit. We knew for sure we were going to get big gusts of wind; well no one can move in with big gusts of wind. We also knew that even if it did not hit us, it was going to hit some part of Texas and I did not want students trying to travel through a storm. I did not want to add additional stress to students taking any chances about coming or not. Hurricanes can move you know, so you did not want someone thinking they could travel and then the storm moves. It just seemed to me, for the sake of parents and students, the easiest thing was to have everyone stay where they were. It was going to be safer for everyone involved. We also only had a few students who had already moved on to campus, so we only had to evacuate eight students. That made it a lot easier.

SG: On campus, as in on Ennis Joslin [Rd.] as well?

KQ: We do Camden [Miramar] and Momentum [Village]. We do those two because the university owns them, the other apartments on Ennis Joslin, students may be in those but we cannot tell them to leave. We did evacuate the students, particularly International Students who may not have anywhere to go.1

SG: Were you helping them find a place to go?

KQ: Yes, we have a place for them in Laredo, Texas. We pick them all up and we take staff with them and they evacuate to Laredo, A&M International. They hosted us there. We make sure they are taken care of.

SG: Did you evacuate or stay?

KQ: I stayed. One of the things then, we had to decided when we were going to shut campus down, even though we were not going to have students move in, having been here at other times, to me I wanted us to shut down quickly so that we could get everything on campus in place. You know, you want to take thing up off the floor, make sure you wrap computers and unplug everything. We started that process immediately so we could shut campus down and people could go take care of their homes, leave and do what they needed to do. We got that all in place. My husband and I had always decided that if the hurricane was a Category Three of less, we would stay. We re-thought that decision [Laughter], and I felt really bad. My poor daughter, at the house had watched on television when the news announced that the hurricane had been upgraded to a Category Four, and she said “well I guess we are leaving now.” Well, it was too late at that point, so I felt really bad. Particularly since I was relatively new to this position as President, I did feel better being closer to the university, because I could then check out things quicker. There is a group that stays on campus, and they shelter down. It is mostly police, some of the Information Technology (IT) folks, and they protect campus and they make sure we have generates. We have data stored in other places, but they keep an on all those things. They were here, and I stayed in town on the South side of Corpus Christ. After the hurricane made landfall, that morning I heard on the radio it was clear so I drove over to campus.

1 “Welcome to Islander Housing,” Texas A&M University-Corpus Corpus Christi, accessed December 8, 2017, housing.tamucc.edu. Camden Miramar and Momentum Village are two TAMU-CC student housing complexes. Miramar is considered a more traditional on-campus housing experience compared to Momentum Village which is located on TAMU-CC’s Momentum Campus off Ennis Joslin Rd; making Momentum Village the best option for established students who want the benefits of on-campus housing and the feel of off-campus living.

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SG: Did you lose power at your house?

KQ: Yes, we went a week without power. It felt like forever.

SG: That is a long time. Was it the day after the hurricane already hit that you went to campus?

KQ: Yes, I had come back that next morning [August 26, 2017]. It was probably closer to noon. Everything seemed like it was alright. It was very weird, no one was out, and you had to be very careful with powerlines – or something like that – might be down. When I got on to campus, it was shocking to me how little damage there was compared to what there could have been. The last thing I heard, before the television went out was that the hurricane was going to be a Category Four and that the surge was going to be about eleven feet. Well, we are at twelve feet. So, now everything just changed and I was like, “Oh Please! Protect the University” [Laughter]. And what just blew me away when I came back, was that the trees that had fallen, I guess the wind – because it went between the buildings – it knocked them down as if they were chopped. They would fall right next to the building and did not hit the building. It was amazing. I was in shock in a good way, to come on campus and see that there was some damage but it was minor for a Category Four hurricane. That is one of the things, that it was a Category Four so on a normal day it would have been a lot of damage [Laughter]; but all things considered, what it could have been versus what it was when you look at Rockport, Texas or Port Aransas, Texas, it was very minor in comparison.

SG: Other than trees was there any significant building damage?

KQ: Some roofing tiles flew off and some water damage. Ironically, some of the buildings that usually leak on really rainy days, did not because it was more wind damage than water damage. In the student housing we had to make sure everything was okay, and even now we are finding things like roofs that maybe we would not have replaced for five years will probably be replaced in a year or two. There are some accelerated maintenance that we will have to do.

SG: When preparing for the hurricane, looking back was there anything you would have done slightly different?

KQ: Well, one of the things I should add because I think it is kind of funny: I was named President of the University when I was at College Station. They officially named me, and voted, and I walked out of the meeting and shut campus down.

SG: Oh wow! [Laughter]

KQ: [Laughter] I felt like I had set some kind of record [Laughter]. The things I would have done differently, is there are certain kinds of cellphones that we have, that you can get that will work even if you lose cell service. We were foolish in that, the CFO left and he took that phone and I stayed and I did not have it. So I would be hit or miss when I could get cell service. Sometimes I would be able to make a lot of calls. I could always text though, texting was really good. We learned a couple of things. One is that – because they had some issues with the generator on campus – so next time the team on campus will have a generator expert [Laughter] because we realized that was very important. The other thing is that we have done some fairly good prep for what happens if you have to be off campus for longer periods of time, and I feel like that is an area that we really need to strengthen. I feel like we were good, but I do not feel like we were outstanding. We are really outstanding for how to get everybody off and how to get everything safe, but to really run this university online from a distance if we had to be shut down for a while, I think that is something we want to strengthen. The other thing we did really well – which we have now prepared for the future and sort of put it into place during this whole hurricane situation and took tons of notes so we could pick it up like that [Snaps finger] – was putting a call center into place. People came in and took calls from any students that had questions and we started cases that followed the students to make sure they were taken care of and so on. That worked really well. Next time we know exactly how to set that up, but that became something really important. We also did a lot of communication, which I think was great and we did a lot of communication through social media because sometimes that was the one place people were getting communication and so I think we did that very well and I would probably just increase that

4 a little bit just because the social media seemed to be the one place everybody was getting information. Formal networks are good but social media is really powerful as well.

SG: Was it a week that we [TAMU-CC Students] had missed school?

KQ: Yes.

SG: What would have been the next step if we had to go online? How would you go about making classes that were supposed to be on campus, online?

KQ: Well, if we found ourselves in a situation like [University of New Orleans] when Hurricane Katrina hit, I think they could not get back to campus for quite a long period of time. It hurt the students, it hurt the faculty. We do have a situation where we could move everybody temporarily online. Every single class, even if it is not an online class has an online shell that is populated with the students that are in the class. You could reach out to students and have assignments. You could get things up and going. If you needed to two weeks, you do not lose instruction. We were very fortunate that Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board allowed us to not have to make up that week. You know, if you miss two or three weeks, then you have to figure out how to cram all those hours in. By having that online component, it allows students to get information that they need. Given where the hurricane situation happened for us, we realized there was all kinds of things we would have had to consider. If we had been down for a longer period, students would not have had their books. There was a lot of pieces like that. You also have to have a great monitoring and tracking system in place so that, for example, maybe a faculty member is here and they do not have any internet so they cannot go online, so the questions arises, how do you make sure that the students who are going online can reach faculty? The other thing I think we did well and we would want to expand if we had to is that if students hit a circumstance – having trouble paying their tuition or they needed to withdraw – we were giving refunds, the apartment complexes were giving refunds. I mean everyone was really focused on student success and really helping students. We have kept counseling going the entire semester. The most important thing is to make sure that students, faculty and staff that were impacted by this were okay. One of the things that kind of threw us off a little bit was, we have a team Cotton – a company that comes down and remediates after a hurricane making sure that your sheet rock is our so you do not get mold and they dry everything and they help you get ready – that is located out of Houston, Texas. So a giant team came for us, yet when everything happened in Houston [with their flooding], a part of the team stayed but a big chunk of the team went to Houston where they were needed. In a normal situation the whole team would have been able to stay, so we might have even been able to get the campus back up faster but of course they had to go help the folks in Houston.

SG: That is interesting.

KQ: It was definitely a wild ride. I have been here twenty-four years and I am like, seriously I am President for twenty minutes and this happens [Laughter]. Well I thought, check I am done [Laughter]. They say every fifty years a storm like this hits, so we are good for fifty years. I am banking on that.

SG: [Laughter] I was thinking that too, that you had just become President and that was your first experience.

KQ: Well, something funny – I will not say who – but someone said to me: “Oh look at this a woman becomes President and God hit you with a hurricane.” I said no, God waited until there was a woman in charge to make sure we could make it through a hurricane. [Laughter]

SG: [Laughter] That is funny. [Laughter] I think things turned out good. Coming from the student side, always getting those emails and texts from the university, I think that it was reassuring and it made me feel that the campus had their things together in a sense.

KQ: It was very interesting, that there was a group of us – myself, Jasmine O’darcy, [Manager of Public Relations Ms.] Luisa Buttler, and Cassie Laurence – we were constantly in communication writing those emails and texts. We worked together writing them all, changing some words,

5 because it is very important to me that we always communicate like a family, a unit. It cannot sound too much like a news report because that it not what we are doing. Yes, we are giving news and facts, but you are also a community. This kept us in contact for quite a bit which may not be typical for a President, but my degree is in Communication so to me that actually made me feel better. There are points where I wanted to be able to do things but, you cannot just suddenly make the electricity work right? That is the other thing I learned that was really valuable the ability to plug your phone into your car and keep it charged [Laughter].

SG: I bought five of those portable chargers and we stocked up at the house.

KQ: Yes, that piece of being able to have your phone, even though sometimes you were not able to get service. Were you here?

SG: Yes, we stayed. We live three miles off of campus so we were pretty nervous but we were prepared.

KQ: This is also kind of funny, we were in the middle of buying a house when this all happened. I was supposed to close that Friday of the hurricane, so we bumped it to the next week to make sure the house was still there. I thought, oh my god I am buying a new house and there is a hurricane [Laughter]. The thing that is so interesting is that UTMSI, Marine Science Institute, one of the things we were able to do – I mean they got wiped out, they are out in Port Aransas – was put them on our campus.

SG: Really?

KQ: It was this feeling that you just want to help. It could have easily been us as easily as it was them. Additionally, I talked to the FEMA folks when this all first happened, I was able to go to the meetings with the Governor and those folks, the FEMA representative said, for stable things like a university, it is probably better not to burn your people out volunteering at the beginning because there are so many volunteers it is important to get it organized. For example, we are getting ready to do “Giving Tuesday,” where we are sending people out to Rockport, Texas and Port Aransas. Then we will do “Alternative Holiday Break,” and we do the “Big Event,” and other things. One of the really troublesome things, after a certain period of time, the volunteers go home and things are still not completed.

SG: Well, we have touched on some policies and procedures that you wanted to for the next hurricane.

KQ: Yes, the interesting thing was that I was part of the Incident Command team as Provost, but I want to be back in the Incident Command structure officially just because that is the best way to follow the FEMA regulation. That is a minor thing, the structure of the team would pretty much stay the same. I think the other thing that I would change, is just taking some of the initiatives we have in place, for afterward, and really getting those as stabilized as we can because watching what happens, it is hard to get everyone in communication and it is hard to communicate with people spread to the wind. The timing – that is the other piece – of when the hurricane happens in the semester is huge. Being that the hurricane happened before students moved in, it is going to be very different if we had been two weeks into the semester or a month.

SG: Right, and you had said we do not have to make up that week of school?

KQ: Yes, the coordinating board forgave that week for everyone in the state.

SG: Okay.

KQ: We got a whole different learning experience [Laugher].

SG: Life lessons for sure. Is there anything that you can remember you did or anything else that you would like us to know?

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KQ: I would just say that I was really incredibly proud of the faculty and staff on this campus pulling together for each other and students. I was so proud of the students, from reports on Facebook, helping and volunteering. Every day when you are on a place like this, you know how incredible the people you are with, but it takes something like a hurricane that is an “in the face” reminder that this is an incredible group of people: faculty, staff and students.

Interview ends: 24:40.92

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