Hidden heroes

It’s been over a year since the COVID-19 pandemic irrevocably changed modern life as we knew it. From weekend movies and brunch to Monday morning team meetings or lab, daily life, work and school changed drastically. While UAA students, staff and faculty adjusted to life at home, hunkering down to meet professors, colleagues and friends online in virtual meetings and classes on Zoom, the university’s COVID response team worked overtime to handle the constantly evolving situation.

Ron Swartz, emergency manager, and Tim Edwards, director of safety with the university’s Environmental Health & Safety and Risk Management (EHSRM) department collaborated with the University of Alaska (UA) statewide, local and state officials, as well as with Tom Hennessy. Hennessy, an infectious disease epidemiologist recently retired from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and affiliate professor in UAA’s College of Health (COH), was brought on board by UA statewide to offer his expertise. 

With work both on and off-campus this unique group, along with many others across UAA including facilities, university police, students affairs, academic affairs, ITS, residence life and advancement, worked together to develop protocol surrounding the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and to ensure that campus operations ran smoothly and safely.

UAA’s COVID-19 response was a fast-paced game of chess requiring responders to constantly be thinking one step ahead in the ever-evolving crisis. But for Hennessy, Swartz and Edwards, despite the 12 to 18 hour days, their careers and prior training prepared them well for handling the challenge. 

Hennessy joined the CDC in 1994 and also worked at the Arctic Investigations Program — CDC’s field program studying infectious diseases in Alaska and the Arctic — as well as responding to infectious disease events in the U.S. and across the globe. Throughout his 25-year career, Hennessy responded to the first anthrax attacks, helped curb the spread of the SARS outbreak, the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic and worked on the Ebola virus response in West Africa. 

In 2009, Hennessy joined UAA as an affiliate faculty member and has taught a class nearly every year since in the Master of Public Health program on infectious disease and epidemiology. He was tapped early on in the pandemic by UAA alumna Natasha Pineda, who at the time was the director of the Anchorage Health Department for the Municipality of Anchorage (MOA), who asked him to join her team as the consulting epidemiologist.

“I quickly organized faculty from COH and a couple of folks from ISER to help evaluate the situation in Anchorage,” said Hennessy. In particular, the group was looking at two mathematical models that had been published and were being used to evaluate the current situation. “It essentially let us project about how many cases a community might have and what that might do to hospital capacity and what kind of interventions could be taken to try and slow things down.”

In about a week, Hennessy’s group from UAA drafted a report using the model and communicated to the mayor, as well as the governor and the commissioner of health and a few more statewide health official staff members, that COVID-19 was a highly contagious and that the rapid spread of the virus could easily overwhelm health systems and Alaska was at risk if the transmission was not significantly slowed down.

“That early effort by UAA faculty provided scientific backing to the mayor’s position and it led to an ongoing relationship with MOA’s Health Department,” Hennessy said. “They saw some value in what we produced and asked us to consult with them on other topics.” 

Back on campus, the EHSRM, who also included team members Marcy Marino, chemical hygiene officer, Neal Van Gorder, safety specialist and Wayne Mitchell, technician with the Wendy Williamson Auditorium were putting in extra long hours. Not only were UAA’s COVID responders working with health officials statewide to develop policy and protocol for dealing with the rapid spread of COVID, but they were also tasked with preparing students, faculty and staff for working remotely and shuttering campus, except for the few essential personnel and buildings that needed to stay open.

“Every day was a new exercise in decision-making,” Swartz said. He’s worked at UAA for 23 years, starting as a police officer in the University Police Department (UPD). He rose through UPD’s ranks and eventually started training new UPD officers. After the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, Swartz learned about all-hazards training and moved to a full-time emergency management position and in 2015, moved from UPD to his most recent position in EHSRM. 

Additionally, Swartz liaised between the university, statewide and national emergency management teams. “I was regularly participating in briefings with the city and state emergency operations centers and feeding that information to the incident management team and chancellor’s cabinet — and I’m still doing that.”

Edwards, although fairly new to UAA, served in the Air Force for 30 years and spent 24 of them as the director for safety at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. Used to operating in stressful situations, Edwards served a tour in Afghanistan and survived a rocket launch attack. He spent the latter half of his career managing flight safety for pilots and aircraft. He was used to “being the calm” in the middle of a storm and although the pandemic forced him and his team into extended work-weeks, it was a situation he was prepared to handle. 

“You just kind of learn how to operate on your feet and you just have to make decisions that will move you forward,” said Ewards. He likened the situation to the Apollo mission saying throughout the EHSRM’s participation in UAA’s COVID response , they were thrown a “lot of popsicle sticks and duct tape.” “We were figuring things out, like how to have face-to-face classes — people were really thinking out of the box.”

Although Hennessy, Swartz and Edwards were tackling different issues throughout the pandemic, each brought their expertise and years of experience in the field to work toward a common goal: to ensure the safety of students, faculty, staff and community members and to provide a university experience that was positive and conducive to learning for students. 

“The way we have supported the state and municipality’s COVID effort with the planning and the modeling, UAA has been a huge component in that response, and I’m pretty proud of that,” said Swartz. “We’re one of the bigger employers in the city, and we have a footprint across the state. I’ve seen how we make an impact in our communities and that is meaningful to me.”