‘Help me! Help me!’

For decades, Butler County’s plan for dealing with a disaster was simple: Call Wichita for help.

There was no emergency management department. The county’s official disaster plan was little more than another county’s plan with the words “Butler County” used instead, and even then it merely gathered dust on a shelf somewhere, said Jim Schmidt, 67, a longtime resident and now the county official in charge of helping Butler County plan for emergencies.

“A lot of the thought was, ‘We live next to this great big metropolitan area. We’ve always called them for help. They’ve always come. That’s what we’ll do because we don’t have the resources, and we don’t want to mess with it,’ ” Schmidt said.

A long, dark night 25 years ago changed all of that.

Eyes ‘like saucers’

Meteorologists had warned for days that violent weather was possible on April 26, and Schmidt and his wife stopped on K-15 on their drive home to Rose Hill to watch the tornado tear into McConnell Air Force Base.

Within minutes of getting home, he was heading to Andover as part of a Rose Hill EMS crew. The first clue that things were going to be bad was that the only route into town not blocked by debris was east-bound Central.

“It was the only way we could get through,” Schmidt said. “We drove over power lines and around trees and power poles.”

They reached the corner of Central and Andover Road in Andover, where they came across a wide-eyed EMT for the only ambulance Andover had. The Golden Spur mobile home park just to the south of that intersection had taken a direct hit, she told them, and there were hundreds of injuries.

“Her eyes were like saucers,” Schmidt said.

By the time she had finished that sentence, people were already swarming to the intersection from the Golden Spur.

“People were coming up, saying, ‘Help me! Help me!’ ” Schmidt said. “People had victims slung over their shoulders or they were carrying them on a piece of plywood.’ ”

The intersection of Central and Andover Road became a triage point, where victims were taken to a large tent to be assessed and stabilized. About 30 doctors happened to be at a charity golf tournament at nearby Terradyne Country Club and came to lend a hand.

Victims who were seriously hurt were loaded into pickups or cars that immediately headed west toward one of Wichita’s hospitals. True to the county’s “disaster plan,” a call for help went out to Wichita.

“The answer was, ‘Hey, we’ve got a disaster of our own. Once we get some resources, we’ll try to send you some,’ ” Schmidt said.

Help from surrounding counties

The same tornado that slammed into Andover had struck Haysville, south Wichita and McConnell Air Force Base.

“Our saving graces was those places around us that did not get hit — the Harvey counties, the Marion counties,” Schmidt said.

Ambulances began arriving from throughout the region.

“I remember looking up once and seeing a Hesston EMS ambulance sitting in the parking lot with us, and I went, ‘How ironic is that? Last year we were in Hesston doing this. This year they’re here with us,’ ” Schmidt said.

A large tornado, measuring F5 on the Fujita Scale, had hit Hesston on March 13, 1990, killing a child on a rural homestead near Burrton.

What is commonly referred to as the Andover tornado a year later killed 17 — 13 of them in the Golden Spur — and injured hundreds more.

The tragedy drove home the fact that changes needed to be made in how Butler County responded to disasters, Schmidt said.

State officials had urged Butler County to create an emergency management department — state law required it — but local officials moved slowly.

When she became a county commissioner early in 1991, Cindy Ball made the new department a mission. The tornado, she said, merely reinforced the need for it.

Several months later, Schmidt’s employer, Collins Industries, was bought by a company that wanted to consolidate production in Florida.

“I really did not want to move to Florida,” Schmidt said.

He started getting calls from people around the area urging him to apply for the emergency management director position the county was creating. The new job was “right up your alley,” they told Schmidt.

Schmidt hesitated, not wanting to give up his work with EMS, but finally relented and was hired.

His first office was in a metal building next to Augusta’s airport. It was a substation for the sheriff and a place residents could get their license plates renewed.

A storage space in the back was cleared out and a desk, telephone, typewriter and file cabinet were brought in.

“There wasn’t even a pen or a pencil,” Schmidt said. “They knew very little about what that should encompass, but they knew they had to have it.

“To me, that was the greatest thing they ever did,” he said. “They gave me a blank slate.

“My marching orders were, ‘Don’t ever let this happen again.’ ”

More tornado sirens

Over the years, Andover and Butler County transformed from a case study in how not to do things to a leader in severe weather preparedness.

“We were really, really fortunate in hiring Jim Schmidt,” Ball said. “Jim had the personality that we needed for that job.”

In a county “full of people not used to working together,” she said, Schmidt was able to build consensus and convince them of the need for training, equipment and services not necessarily needed often.

In 1991, Andover had one tornado siren — and it wasn’t working on April 26. Now the city features so many sirens they overlap each other, Schmidt said. Text message alerts can be sent to residents who have signed up for the service.

Butler County used to sound every tornado siren whenever a tornado warning was issued for any part of a county that is larger in area than Rhode Island. Now sirens only within the geographic boundaries of a warning area are activated.

The final touches are being put on an app that would allow operations center staff to interact easily with officials out on the scene, streamlining communications and decision-making.

The county has a disaster plan as well as an emergency operations center in Augusta. But every town in the county has a plan and operations center now, too.

“We’re always out there trying to work with them,” Schmidt said. “That’s our business.”

Battlefield triage

One of the points Schmidt stresses is to focus on the task at hand and expect the unexpected.

“We wouldn’t call it a disaster if it wasn’t something out of your control,” he said. “So many people miss the boat on mass-casualty situations.

“We really don’t teach them what it’s really like,” he said. “People are going to be carrying people on doors or plywood. You are not going to have ambulances right away. Pickup trucks make great ambulances. Cars make great ambulances.

“It’s that battlefield triage thing, and it still works today.”

In an era of budget cuts and shifting priorities, Schmidt said he worries that emergency preparedness will be downsized and leave populations vulnerable should a disaster strike.

His work, Schmidt said, is driven by a haunting question: If another EF5 tornado bore down on Andover, “How do we keep everyone safe?”

This story was originally published April 23, 2016 at 3:46 PM with the headline "‘Help me! Help me!’."