before detailed reports had reached them to make the extent of the emergency clear. Mrs. Marion Chapman, the Director of Social Services, knew something was up when she noticed the ambulance sirens blaring right up to the emergency room door; they were usually cut off once the vehicle was safely out of traffic. On 1 August 1966 the attendants hurriedly unloaded their patients, returned to their vehicles, and sped off again.
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Joe Roddy, a well-known Austin newsman from KTBC, had left the campus to provide live coverage at the hospital. "It seemed like the ambulances were coming in every few seconds. I . . . remember all the stretchers they had. There were two or three dozen, just piled up, waiting,"
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Roddy remembered ten years later. Several witnesses remember him helping to unload ambulances.
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Leeda Bryce remembered: "It was constant . . . ambulances driving up. Then all of a sudden we had half of Austin outside the emergency room. It got to the point where ambulances were parked in the middle of the street."
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Other patients were cleared from the hospital's clinic, which soon became a morgue. A twenty-one-bed wing that had been closed the preceding May because of a personnel shortage was quickly reopened. For the next few hours Brackenridge would have no such shortage. Within minutes, dozens of doctors from all parts of Austin arrived to tend to the wounded. The director of the Brackenridge School of Nursing arrived with a group of students who served as "runners." If anyone needed anything they called for a runner. As Bryce remembered: "There were [doctors] in the emergency room, some in the operating room, some sitting there waiting to operate, and they all came wanting to help."
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The situation at Brackenridge could have easily deteriorated into a state of panic, but in the eye of the storm was the "General." Everyone listened to Mrs. Bryce, whose war-time nursing experience served her well. Her split-second decisions assigned doctors and nurses to patients according to injury and space. In the face of an incredible tragedy, Brackenridge's disaster plan worked well, and undoubtedly, saved lives.
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Other divisions at Brackenridge went on alert. Soon, scores of police, reporters, relatives and friends of the wounded, and others such as blood donors, descended upon the hospital. Patrolman Elton Edwards was assigned to control traffic as ambulances delivered the
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