Disasters happen — here’s how to soften their blow in the lab

Disasters happen - here’s how to soften their blow in the lab
In 2017, Hurricane Maria’s heavy rains and high-speed winds caused widespread devastation in Puerto Rico.Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

Hurricanes are common visitors of Puerto Rico. So when Hurricane Maria developed in the Caribbean in mid-September 2017, atmospheric chemist Olga Mayol-Bracero, then at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras in San Juan, knew how to prepare. She and two laboratory members drove to her field sites — one at a coastal reserve called Cabezas de San Juan, and another in the cloud forest atop the El Yunque mountain. They secured their 9-metre-tall sampling towers, removed components that could get blown away, covered windows and disconnected equipment from power supplies.

Maria slammed Puerto Rico with winds of 249 kilometres per hour — the most intense storm to hit the island since 1928. But in the storm’s immediate aftermath, Mayol-Bracero didn’t know the extent of the devastation. After checking in on her family and her research group, she drove out to inspect the damage. She found the coastal station largely destroyed, and the mountain station utterly demolished. The wooden research cabin, the equipment and the sampling tower had blown away, leaving only a small generator that was too heavy for the wind to carry. Surveying more than a decade’s worth of lost work, she recalls, “I was speechless. I asked myself, ‘Shall I keep doing this, or shall I move to something else?’.”

Climate change is ratcheting up the likelihood of extreme weather events, meaning that the impact of natural disasters such as Hurricane Maria is likely to worsen. Hurricanes can at least be anticipated in regions that are prone to them. Other natural disasters, such as earthquakes, might come out of the blue. But whether they’re due to water, fire or shaking earth, “these events have a lasting impact”, says John Byrne, a neuroscientist at the McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Byrne saw his and his colleagues’ labs destroyed when Tropical Storm Allison made landfall in 2001. After a devastating storm, research projects can be upended, tenure clocks disrupted and institutional resources hobbled for years on end. But there are things researchers can do to soften the blow.
Olga Mayol-Bracero’s research centre in the Cabezas de San Juan Nature Reserve before (top left) and after (bottom left) Hurricane Maria struck. A new research facility (right) was built in its place after the storm.Olga Mayol-Bracero

Flexibility is key, says Mayol-Bracero, who did muster the energy to rebuild after Maria. Within two months, even as the island reeled from ruined infrastructure and a destroyed health system, she wrote seven grant applications and won six of them, worth a total of US$2.2 million. Four specifically targeted reconstruction, including the loan of a US Department of Energy trailer containing sampling equipment, which now sits at the coastal station. Still, not everything could be revived. The mountain station is only partially functional, and Mayol-Bracero has abandoned her plans to build an urban station. “When you reconstruct, you make sure something like this doesn’t happen in the future,” she says. She moved her lab to Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, in 2021, but continues to collaborate with researchers in Puerto Rico and around the world. “One thing we learnt is, we need a resilience and mitigation plan.”

A wake-up call

Jemma Purandare, a PhD student in environmental sciences at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, found herself regrouping when her research project on sediment transport in estuaries was literally washed away by massive rainfall and floods in 2021 and 2022. She had collected data from two-thirds of her planned sites, but the flooding meant she couldn’t compare those sites with the remaining ones. And that was on top of significant delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Honestly, I felt like abandoning my research,” Purandare says. But she soon realized that the circumstances, although ruinous, provided an opportunity to study how flooding affects sediment transport, the ecosystem and water quality. “Being able to see [the floods] as a chance to do research that can’t be planned but that is incredibly valuable, is a really great thing,” she says.

Natural disasters often serve as wake-up calls regarding preparedness. For Houston, which is home to several universities and medical centres — and indeed, for other storm-prone areas in the United States — that event was Tropical Storm Allison, which in 2001 dropped more than 1 metre of rain on some areas, causing massive flooding.

At the time, few institutional safety departments had fully thought through specific vulnerabilities in lab facilities, says Robert Emery, vice-president for safety, health, environment and risk management at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, whose nickname is ‘Safety Bob’. Some of his institution’s generators were located on the roof, for instance, but the switch gears controlling them were in the basement, which flooded heavily, knocking out power for several weeks. As freezers thawed, irreplaceable research materials were lost — as were thousands of research animals, owing to flooding where they were housed.

In Allison’s wake, the institution rebuilt, installing upgrades such as flood doors, back-up power and flood-proof animal facilities. They also established new preparedness protocols. Today, every lab head is asked to complete a four-page disaster plan that is filed with the university safety office. It lists contact information for all lab members and walks lab heads through a multi-step planning process that involves, among other things, protecting equipment, data and samples and identifying people who can help to continue research during an emergency and the resources to do so.
Robert Emery closes a flood door at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.Uthealth

“Think of this as an at-home will kit,” says Emery. “You are not required to have a will, but it’s probably a good idea.” Emery also encourages researchers to read their universities’ insurance policies for disaster coverage, noting that, after Allison, some were surprised to learn that their losses either were not covered or had failed to meet their deductibles — and that they were on the hook for replacing them.

Planning for everyday emergencies can go a long way towards mitigating risk, Emery says. He has found that the top perils that research labs face are water leaks, electrical power interruptions and theft, two of which require the same safeguards that protect against larger-scale emergencies. “Imagine a really expensive microscope you’re not currently using — hey, maybe get a plastic cover on that and move it off the floor,” Emery says. “Focusing on miniature losses improves resilience for the big ones.”

Mitigation strategies

Hiroaki Tomita is a psychiatry researcher at Tohoku University who conducts clinical and lab studies on mental-health conditions. On 11 March 2011, he was in his office when the ground began to heave. A 9.1-magnitude quake, the strongest in Japan’s recorded history, originated in the Pacific Ocean. It was about 130 kilometres from Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku region of northern Japan. The subsequent tsunami triggered the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.

As his building shook and the electricity went out, Tomita’s mind went straight to his irreplaceable samples of post-mortem human brain tissue, which were stored in the lab at –70 °C. Before evacuating the building, he ran there to move the samples into a liquid-nitrogen tank. He found that much of the lab’s equipment had crashed to the floor because it hadn’t been secured to the wall — now a common recommendation for earthquake-prone areas. Laboratory computers were damaged, and the team lost data that had not been backed up. Although the institution had held regular earthquake drills, Tomita says, “we were not well-prepared for the disaster”.

These days, institutional safety officers routinely check on researchers’ compliance with preparedness protocols, and Tomita notes that when a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the Kumamoto prefecture in southwestern Japan, in 2016, researchers and the community were better prepared.

So, what can you do? Power down all equipment when not in use, and keep equipment, computers and anything else that would be ruined by water off the floor. Back up data to the cloud, or — if patient privacy or other regulations preclude that — in at least two offsite locations, advises neuroscientist Zhiqian Yu, Tomita’s colleague at Tohoku University.

Bank stocks of especially precious samples offsite as well, and make sure you have enough liquid nitrogen to store any samples in your own freezers in case of extended power outages, adds Tomita.

Scientists who work with animals should draw up plans for an alternative facility — say, a colleague’s laboratory — in which they can house animals in the case of an extreme event, says Robert Taft, senior services programme manager at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. And cryopreserve especially important strains’ sperm or embryos in case animal facilities are damaged, he adds. Taft and his colleagues often reach out to facilities in areas where an extreme event is anticipated with an offer to collect animals for cryopreservation.

Finally, try to keep disaster preparation at the front of your mind, advises William Davis Mace, a senior lab specialist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Mace was one of the few people in his campus building on 18 March 2020, just a couple of days after public spaces shut down because of COVID-19, when a 5.7-magnitude earthquake struck.

In that part of the world, “the ground shakes all the time”, says Mace, and the institution performs regular safety audits to ensure that shelves and equipment are bolted to the floor. It also participates in an annual earthquake drill with first responders called The Great Shakeout. But it’s the daily interventions, and ongoing efforts to keep preparedness in the conversation, that help to ensure that even small mishaps are minimized, Mace says.

“Safety is one of those things that you never actually cross the finish line with,” Mace says. “And same with preparation. It’s just human nature to become complacent.”