
NASH: Lucky or just a grim joke? Well, actually, in one way, Lubbock was lucky because we were prepared for disaster as very few cities are. Just the year before, the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency had picked Lubbock for a pilot project; a testing round, and disaster experts from the federal and state governments came in, worked long and hard with the city officials and their neighbors to produce a model emergency readiness plan. This plan, covering every conceivable kind of disaster and telling us exactly just what we had to do. Second, we had a working emergency operating center to do it in. When the trouble came, the top executives stayed together, worked together, made the key decisions. Finally, they kept the people informed. With warning before the twister struck and full information after, these were the things that carried us through. And lucky for Lubbock, we had them because well, I'm Bob Nash, and I learned that even in this day and age, you can get trampled by a dinosaur.