In May, faculty at SUNY Binghamton staged a disaster drill in the Events Center to give nursing students "real life" experience. The next month, real life came calling.

Rivers jumped their banks in the Susquehanna Valley. Officials turned the center into an emergency evacuation shelter for some 2,000 stranded people, many frightened, without medicine and suddenly homeless.

The center, built in 2004 to house sporting and musical events and conferences, morphed into a motel. Nurses, nursing students, maintenance staff, security, administrators, faculty, food service workers, counselors and campus police were among the 250 volunteers who worked through five days and nights to help those who had lost homes.

Nurse Carolyn Pierce asked neighbors to watch her home. She packed a bag and headed to campus.

"As I drove over the bridge, the water was close to reaching the deck," said Pierce, who belongs to United University Professions, the academic and professional union for the State University of New York.

"We put a call out for volunteers and, within an hour, 45 people showed up to roll up their sleeves," said Gail Glover, director of media for the university and member of UUP.

Triage

Nurses set up a triage to assess those who needed care. In one day alone, 600 blood sugar tests were done to treat people with diabetes. Others required wound care, oxygen and intravenous antibiotic therapy. People exposed to dirty water from the flooding needed immunizations, said Mary Ann Condon, associate dean of nursing. A pharmacy was set up with supplies donated from local pharmacies and hospitals. Condon and a Red Cross volunteer went to the campus nursing lab for gurneys, and ran them down Campus Drive. Some people had to be transported to the hospitals for serious conditions.

"Many of the nursing BU faculty pitched in wherever they were needed and we actually had quite an efficient hospital-like area on the floor of the Events Center," said Pierce. The hospital beds they had were essential, she said, because the center was filled with many frail and elderly, who could not clamber down onto the Red Cross mats.

"Our nursing students were able to see first-hand how to manage people in crisis — whether they were old or sick or even mentally disturbed," Pierce said. "When they evacuated county housing, we received many very fragile people — aged or psychologically infirm."

More than 7,000 meals were served by food service employees, who also drove around to track down produce. Events center staff kept the building clean and orderly.

Susan Crane, assistant director of the Events Center, was a fixture with her bullhorn. "People want is to hear what's going on," she said. She fed them updates on the floods and the roads, gleaned from Web sites and offices, and announced when relatives arrived.

Some people drove out when roads reopened.

"Many times they just left the center and then came back because they had nothing to go back to," said Crane, a UUPer.

— Liza Frenette