Gary Goolsby

Gary D. Goolsby

Q: This is Sam Robson here today with Gary Goolsby. It is October 24th, 2018, and we're sitting in the audio recording studio at CDC's Roybal Campus in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm talking with Gary today as part of our CDC Ebola Response Oral History Project for the David J. Sencer CDC Museum. Really happy to have you join me today, Gary. Thank you for being here.

GOOLSBY: Thank you for asking me.

Q: Of course. To start off, would you mind saying the phrase, "My name is," and then pronouncing your full name?

GOOLSBY: My name is Gary Goolsby.

Q: What's your current position with CDC?

GOOLSBY: I'm an emergency management specialist within the Division of Emergency Operations. Basically, I do logistics. I work in the Logistics Support Branch. We support deployers with travel, transportation, equipment, room space. If we 00:01:00have people deploy to the EOC [Emergency Operations Center] and they need meeting space, just whatever we can do customer-service-oriented that we can help deployers do their mission.

Q: If you were to summarize to someone in a few sentences what your overall role in CDC's Ebola response was, what would you say?

GOOLSBY: At that time, I was over the travel and transportation team. Right now, I'm over just the travel team because it got to be so much that I could only do travel during that time, so they peeled transportation away from me after that. During the Ebola response, I was over travel and transportation within logistics, and me and my team were responsible for getting all the responders to where they needed to go and back, whether that be West Africa, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia. Also, we sent people to Nigeria because at the onset of the 00:02:00outbreak, we had cases in Nigeria. I think we sent people to Mali. Bamako, Mali. I think we had cases there. I think those were the main African places. But I think we may have sent some people to Geneva, the World Health Organization, I think we did. But also, within the US, we sent people to Texas, where they had the case there. Sent a lot of people to Texas on very short notice, same-day notice. We sent people to New York for the case that was up there. Then also, in Anniston, Alabama, they had the training facility where they would teach people how to use PPE [personal protective equipment] before they would be deployed to West Africa, so we sent a lot of people over there in waves. Every week we would send a new group of people over there, so we were doing the travel work for that. There was also a team that would go around the US to inspect hospitals. If 00:03:00they didn't hit every state, they had to have hit tons of them. But they would go around and inspect hospitals to make sure they were ready to handle an Ebola patient, someone with a hemorrhagic fever. And we traveled that team around quite a bit, we did a lot of travel for them. So that was the domestic part of travel we did for Ebola.

Another thing I did for Ebola is, at that time, I was basically the main transportation guy, and I chartered airplanes to move samples. We want to try to use a commercial carrier like Delta DASH or something like that, but sometimes because of the magnitude of the event, how important it is and how quickly we 00:04:00want to get it here, we would charter a jet to go pick up the samples and bring it here. We chartered I think three jets on consecutive nights to move samples from Dallas to Atlanta for that outbreak out there. Before that, we were having problems shipping samples on Delta. They would reject them. We had to have one guy, he literally was a courier company, we had to have him jump in a car with the sample in Dallas and drive straight to Atlanta. After that, we started chartering jets.

Q: We'll get into the details as we go. Is it okay if I back you up for just a second?

GOOLSBY: Absolutely. [laughs]

Q: Great, thank you. Can you tell me when and where you were born?

GOOLSBY: I'm one of the few native Atlantans. I was born at Piedmont Hospital and raised in my mom--my dad just passed away a couple of years ago. They were 00:05:00married sixty-one years, and my mom still lives in the same house they bought in 1957 near Spaghetti Junction over in the Tucker-Doraville area.

Q: Wow. So you grew up in the same house?

GOOLSBY: Same house, yeah.

Q: Can you tell me about what it was like growing up?

GOOLSBY: I just had a normal childhood and played a lot of different sports. That was my dream, was to play high school baseball, college baseball, something like that. Just had a lot of fun growing up. Kids in the neighborhood, real involved in church, and just had a very good childhood.

Q: What did your parents do?

GOOLSBY: My dad was a service technician, and he would repair machines and 00:06:00typewriters back when they had them, office equipment and stuff like that. He did that for a long time. That's basically what he did his whole life. And my mom never worked, she stayed at home.

Q: Did you mention you had siblings?

GOOLSBY: I have one brother, who's older than me. I'm fifty-one, he's fifty-seven now, so he's six years older than me. He still lives in Atlanta. He moved away to Tennessee for a while, but he moved back to Atlanta.

Q: And is he also doing logistics for a major federal agency?

GOOLSBY: No no no. [laughter] He's in storm-repair-type damage. He's been a pro [professional] golfer, he was a home builder before the crash, and then he became, like when there's a house fire or something, he would go in and rebuild the house.

Q: So what happened after high school?

GOOLSBY: Back to when I was a kid, I really just wanted to play high school 00:07:00sports, college sports, so I homed in on baseball in high school. I played a lot of sports in my youth, but I homed in on baseball in high school and got really good at it, enjoyed it. I had an opportunity to play college baseball, so I went to LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia, and played a year there. Then I got a scholarship at [the University of] West Georgia and played a couple of years there, and then messed up my arm and stopped playing baseball. I finished up my schooling at Georgia State [University] at night school while I worked here.

Q: Was it pretty difficult to have that injury?

GOOLSBY: No, it was kind of time. Actually, it was probably a blessing in disguise. It was probably time to--okay, Gary, you're not going to play pro. I did get looked at by the Atlanta Braves and some other team, because that was my dream, to play college baseball and then pro baseball. I did get looked at by a couple pro scouts, but it was kind of a blessing in disguise that I did hurt my 00:08:00arm. It was time to be done with baseball and get on with life.

Q: What position did you play?

GOOLSBY: Pitcher.

Q: After that, did you say you went to Georgia State?

GOOLSBY: Yeah. I was away at school at LaGrange for one year, away at school playing baseball two years at West Georgia, and that's when I had an arm injury. So then I came back home, lived back at home with my parents, and I had gotten kind of a part-time, full-time job at CDC. While I was doing that, I finished up at night school at Georgia State.

Q: At what age did you come to CDC?

GOOLSBY: I got a summer job in 1987, '88 if I remember correctly, down at the warehouse on this campus. The campus does not look anything like it did back 00:09:00then. It's completely redone, I think there's only one building left. But I had a friend at church, his uncle worked at CDC, so my friend would get a job every summer working at CDC cutting grass and so forth. This was before they had landscape contracts, like they do now. He would get a job cutting grass, making good money, eight or nine dollars an hour. Back then, that was a boatload of money. I was like, "Man, Jeff, get me a job." So he threw in a word for me and I was able to get a job working in the warehouse, just pulling orders and stuff. That was right around '87, '88, I can't remember. But that was when I messed up my arm. I knew I wasn't going to go back to West Georgia to play baseball, so I asked the people at CDC, can I just stay on? It was a decent paying job, and I just needed something to pay some bills and help pay for school. So I was 00:10:00working at CDC in the warehouse for a while as an FTE [full-time equivalent employee], but then they got contracted out, so I worked as a contractor in the warehouse for about a year and a half, going to night school. Then a position came open in the shipping office, an FTE position, in '91, so I got that, and that's what drove me to where I'm at here today. Thirty years, '91 to what, about twenty-seven, twenty-eight years ago. [laughs]

Q: Can you trace for me a little bit the journey from shipping to logistics?

GOOLSBY: Yeah. I started off in the shipping office, and I knew nothing about shipping. I didn't know my countries. It was so funny that I would--"Okay, Gary, I need you to ship this to this country." I'm like, I've never even heard of that before. But it was a great learning experience. The people, they liked me because they saw my work habits and so forth, so that's why they hired me to do 00:11:00this even though I didn't know anything. I was working in the warehouse as a contractor, a job came open as an FTE in the shipping office, so I got that. I was doing international shipping, and it was fun because I was shipping computers. I had to become DG certified, dangerous goods certified, so I got a certification to do that. Shipping dangerous goods, you have to put all the hazard labels on the box, the markings, infectious substances infecting humans, UN 2814, and in parentheses you have to put what the disease is, HIV [human immunodeficiency virus] or Ebola or antivirus, you name it, Streptococcus. I've shipped every disease you can think of to wherever around the world, tens of thousands of shipments. That was a fun job. You would ship lifesaving medications to people. There were people dying of some disease, and CDC would 00:12:00have the only medication for that, so we'd have to immediately ship it Delta DASH. I did that, I did the shipping. Then my supervisor retired, and she did household goods relocations, so when CDC would hire someone and bring them to Atlanta, we would move their household goods. So I would do that. I got a promotion, did that for five, six years, something like that. So I'd been working in that office at that time about thirteen years doing transportation. Am I on the right track?

Q: Oh yeah, this is perfect. Thank you.

GOOLSBY: So at that time, 9/11 [September 11, 2001] happened. If you remember 9/11, shortly after that, they had the anthrax attacks. You remember that. So that kind of got lost. But the anthrax attacks is what led me to where I'm at now. What happened is, CDC didn't have the capacity to respond to a big event 00:13:00like that. They didn't have an Emergency Operations Center, the facilities to actually work an emergency. They didn't have the support staff to help the people respond to the event. None of that. It wasn't so much 9/11, it was the anthrax attacks afterwards. They had to make Building 2, I think it was. It was like an old cafeteria or something, auditorium. They had to convert an auditorium into an EOC. After that, I guess Congress, it came through the Bernie Marcus Foundation, co-founder of Home Depot. He himself gave some money but he also went out and raised money through other corporations like Dell Computer and I think Hewlett-Packard. They donated money to CDC, built an EOC, and our first EOC was over in Building 1. That building has been torn down now. They started 00:14:00staffing the EOC with support personnel and logistics and plans and operations, so whenever we had another event--anthrax had already gone by the wayside, but the next time we had a big event, CDC could respond to it in a proper fashion, just like the military. The people that they hired were typically retired military, and they knew how to respond to events, that readiness and preparation and response. That's what they knew how to do. So they started staffing the Emergency Operations Center that had been newly built, it was a beautiful facility. They had a logistics branch. I [was] still in my transportation office, and I started working with them, helping them out on some emergency shipments and transportation stuff. This guy named Toby Crafton, he just 00:15:00retired, he said, "Hey Gary, we've got a position opened up for transportation, we could use you and it would be a promotion for you." So I said, great, because I was looking for a change anyway. I did a lateral transfer from the shipping office where I was working into the Division of Emergency Operations, the logistics branch, doing transportation. That's how I got into the Division of Emergency Operations, and that was in 2004.

Now, CDC, we just got a bunch of money thrown at us from Congress for response and preparedness and readiness and all that. What they did, and it may have been a little overkill, but they established a contract for an airplane, a charter jet, a Gulfstream IV. When the CDC chartered this contract for a jet to use for 00:16:00emergency response, the administration of it fell to the branch I was moving to. Once I got up there to that new branch, they said, Gary, you're going to do transportation, and by the way, you're going to be the project officer for this charter jet contract. I'm like, man, that sounds great. We had that jet and we would have outbreaks or whatever of stuff around the US, and it'd be weekends, middle of the night, I'd get a call, "Gary, we got this outbreak going on in California, we don't know what it is. We need you to jump on the jet and go get a sample and bring it back." I've done many trips on Gulfstream IV, when we had a G4, then we had a G3. I've done many, many trips, just me and the pilots going across country, up to New York and wherever, picking up a sheep's head for rabies, potential novel influenza strain. Many trips like that, coordinating 00:17:00samples and bringing them back to CDC for diagnosis. The H1N1 that happened back in 2009, I was the one that got the samples from--there were two cities in Texas. We got the samples, brought them back, and once they tested positive, yes this is H1N1, boom, we just activated. Lots of charter jet stories. Moving TB [tuberculosis] patients. I don't know if you remember, this is back in '07, we had the tuberculosis guy that wasn't supposed to travel. We got him moved from New York back down to Atlanta. Just a lot of really cool, interesting stuff, moving samples and lifesaving medications and stuff like that.

Q: You must have gotten to know the pilots pretty well.

GOOLSBY: Yeah, I got to know them pretty good. They were cool guys. It was great. When I would go across country, I had the whole jet to myself. I just had a box of samples, whatever it was I was transporting. I could go lay down, take a nap, sleep, listen to music, watch TV. I don't know if you know, on these jets, they have the jump seat that can pop out of the wall of a jet. You were sitting right--just say me and you were the pilots, we're looking out of the cockpit. There's the jump seat that can popped out right here and I would sit right there and overlook the pilots and watch as we were landing. It was just so 00:19:00cool. We were doing a mission, but in addition it was fun. It was cool. [laughter]

Q: Totally. In the process--and I know you'd worked in shipping before, so maybe you already knew it from then--but learning about how to package and transport samples and pathogens really safely? Everything that that takes?

GOOLSBY: I never did that. The laboratorians would actually deal with the samples and put them in the shipping container. My expertise is actually labeling them, putting the infectious substance stickers on them, doing the dangerous goods paperwork. That's what would be my expertise. But the good thing about doing these charter aircrafts is they didn't really care, because it's a charter. You have to do all that packing and paperwork when shipping on a 00:20:00commercial carrier like Delta or United because they want to know what's being put on the plane. But with the charter jet that we would have the contract with, I would give them a heads up, I'd call them at midnight and say, "We've gotta go." We had a two-hour response time, so whenever I called them, they had to be wheels up. It was two companies. The main company was up in Cartersville, that we had the longest contract with, Phoenix Air. They had to be down to Peachtree DeKalb Airport and wheels up with me or whoever within two hours, 24/7/365 [twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year]. They didn't really care if it was marked properly or anything. They just said, "Gary, let's go, let's get the box and bring it back."

Q: How did things develop from there? You mentioned 2009 being the--I'm trying 00:21:00to get a sense of the timeline.

GOOLSBY: I was the project officer for contracts. When I first started in the Division of Emergency Operations, we had a contract with a company, a temporary contract for a Gulfstream IV. The company was FlightWorks. It was a temporary contract and we would extend it for another three months, another three months, and so forth. It lasted about a year or so. Then we put out for bid, we wanted a long-term contract. That's when Phoenix Air won the contract. It was a godsend that they got the contract. They do a lot of military work. They had these really unique, one-of-a-kind government and military contracts. They could land at any NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] airbase around the world, any military base. We landed at Andrews Air Force Base a time or two up in 00:22:00[Washington], DC, where Air Force One is at, through their connections with their other contracts. Why it was so important or just a blessing in disguise that Phoenix Air got the contract--I'm going to diverge a little bit. This is very important for the Ebola response.

Going back to SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] in 2003, remember I was telling you after 9/11, the EOC was built to help with CDC responses? One of the first big responses they had, they were just getting staffed, was the SARS response. I wasn't in there at that time, I was still in my other office. The SARS response, CDC deployed a lot of people around the world for that, but I wasn't involved with that. What happened was they deployed a team to I think 00:23:00Taipei, about five doctors or responders, whatever, and one of the CDC responders got sick with what they thought was SARS, they weren't sure. Our CDC director, Dr. Julie [L.] Gerberding at the time, said we need to get him back to Atlanta as soon as possible. The EOC at the time, I wasn't in there, started calling the logistics people, they started calling these medevac companies, hey, we've got a CDC doctor in Taipei. We're based in Atlanta, we're trying to get him back. Oh really, what's wrong? Well, we think it may be SARS, we don't know. And they would be like, click, we're not handling it, sorry, not on our jets. Remember, this was a very scary thing, it was killing a lot of people. They eventually got him back home. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't like a medevac jet, it was terrible. But they got him back home.

As a result of that, Dr. Gerberding said--and I wasn't in the conversation, this 00:24:00is from what I'm hearing--Dr. Gerberding said, if we're going to send people out into the field, our responders, to investigate these deadly, dangerous diseases, if they get sick, we've got to have a way to get them back to Atlanta quickly for proper treatment. Because right here at Emory University [Hospitals] we have what's called "the slammer" and it's like a level four--that's where Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol were treated. We get them back to Atlanta and we can treat them, move them to Emory and they can be treated and hopefully cured, which came to fruition. So Dr. Gerberding said--this is back in 2003 or 2004--said, we need to come up with a way that we can transport CDC personnel, and anybody else we may want to transfer if it's in the interest of CDC, back to Atlanta if they get sick, and in a safe way so that we're not contaminating the pilots and the air crew and the medical crew that may be treating the patient.

So, looked at purchasing our own plane and it was just too expensive. Purchasing our own plane and converting the back end of it into an air-medical-type facility was just too expensive. We got this three million dollar grant from Congress to work with USAMRIID [United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases], who's up in DC, part of the Army that deals with diseases, and the Air Force and CDC to come up with a containment system for this purpose. The Air Force backed out, were not interested. USAMRIID backed out, were not interested. So that three million dollars fell upon CDC with the task to get this project done. At that time--I told you, we wanted a more permanent long-term contract for our aircraft. This was an aircraft that was on 24/7 00:26:00standby, two-hour response time up to Cartersville for CDC's use and CDC's use only. It was a Gulfstream III. What's unique about this aircraft is that Phoenix Air owned it. They purchased it from the Danish military. It was a great plane. A little like a military plane, but it's a Gulfstream III. And they had two of them. We had one of them, CDC had contracted one of them. What was unique about it is they had a door on the side, a cargo door, custom built, you wouldn't see another G3 like it in the world; a large cargo door on the side that would open up so you could put pallets into it and stuff like that. Phoenix Air is one of the premier medevac companies in the world. They do charter aircrafts and they transport nuclear materials, bombs, all kinds of unique license they have. One of the other things Phoenix Air does is they are the premier medevac company in the world. They would haul sick patients, like these rich Arabs from Oman and 00:27:00Saudi Arabia, over here. They would go get them, bring them back, and take them to the Mayo Clinic in Cleveland for treatment. They were topnotch. It kind of worked great that we had this contract with them.

We got this three million dollars, we got Phoenix Air, who's one of the premier medevac companies in the world, and we had this unique plane that can fly and is internationally capable, that has this large cargo door on the side. Plus, Phoenix Air, they had a metal shop, a manufacturing shop, they could just do all kinds of things, really cool. So what we did is basically we had Phoenix Air make a containment system. We also had--the military didn't completely get out of it. We had part of the military, a guy who was with the Navy, they were 00:28:00engineers and they helped with the project as well. But as we got into this project to design what would be known as the ABCS, the Air Medical Biological Containment System. That's what this project was geared for, was to come up with a system to be able to transport infectious patients safely in long distances. That technology existed, but what they would do, from what I understand, the military had it, is if someone was sick, they would basically put them in a little coffin and shrink wrap them basically is what it was like and give them a drug or something to sedate them and then move them. CDC personnel, medical response, they didn't want that. They wanted more of a chamber so the patient could just, if they were able to, walk around and use the restroom, lay down on 00:29:00the stretcher and so forth. They didn't want that little cocoon-type structure. So with this three million dollars, we had experts with CDC, we had a little team from the military, and we had Phoenix Air. I was the administrative guy. I wasn't the expert in airflow and disease and all that. I was the one that worked with procurement and making sure the contracts were okay and setting up meetings and stuff like that. But I worked with all of them and each party just to make sure the project was moving along. But Phoenix Air, like I said, it was a blessing we had the contract with them because when we first got the contract with them it was just a charter jet to move samples and personnel. But when we got this three million dollars, it was like, hey, by the way, this jet, Phoenix Air, they're a medevac company, they have nurses and all that on staff, paramedical nurses, and they have the expertise to do it, to make this chamber. 00:30:00So we made this chamber that fits on this Gulfstream III that has the big cargo door on the side and it would fit on the back of the plane. It's just a portable, tent-like thing, so it would fit on the back of the plane. It was probably nine feet long or something like that, and we had to get it approved by the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration], and it changed the airflow within the plane. Usually within the plane, the Gulfstream, it's weird, the airflow inside the cabin goes from the rear to the front. If you've got this sick person, you don't want the germs going to the pilots. So whenever this ABCS is in use, we put it on the plane and it's in use, they would flip a switch, and that's how great Phoenix Air is, they figured out a way to do this. They would flip a switch and it would make the airflow go from the front of the plane to the rear, so it would blow out all the--if the germs got out into the cabin, which it shouldn't, because this air medical biological containment system had an 00:31:00antechamber and filtration units on each side that would kill the germs or whatever and send the bad stuff out the plane. So just a great thing. That thing was built with Phoenix Air. We got our three million dollars and built it. It took like two or three years to build it and get it approved by FAA, we were good to go. Sat on the shelf collecting dust for two years. We had CDC doctors that said this was a waste of money, should've never built this thing, CDC will never use it. Ebola happened. We had Kent Brantly, Nancy Writebol, you know who they are.

Q: Samaritan's Purse.

GOOLSBY: They were Samaritan's Purse.

Q: Liberia, were infected.

GOOLSBY: Yes. [W.] Franklin Graham started Samaritan's Purse. So Samaritan's 00:32:00Purse was over there, so Kent Brantly, a doctor over there, Nancy Writebol, I think she may have been a nurse or something. They get sick.

Let me back up a little bit. July of 2014 is when we really started, okay, this is getting bad over there. It's funny because in May 2014, I passed a guy in the EOC, we knew nothing about Ebola, but I remember him saying, "Ebola is getting pretty bad over there." That was in May, and in July it was really getting bad. The Department of State up in DC, they're responsible for moving US government personnel around the world who are deployed--either permanently assigned to 00:33:00another country or they're TDY [temporary duty assignment] there. They're responsible for moving that person if they have to be moved back to the US or to a treatment facility. If they're in Africa and they break a leg and need to be moved to London, the Department of State--I forget what they're called, Medical Services Unit or something [note: Bureau of Medical Services] in DC, they're responsible for moving those personnel. The guy's name is Will [William A.] Walters, a brilliant guy at the Department of State, I think he's an MD. When they started seeing Ebola is really spreading in West Africa, and they had the forethought I guess when they knew we were going to be sending a lot of US government personnel over there to help out with this response, they had to think, okay, if someone gets sick with Ebola, how are we going to move them out of there? Remember, at this time, we had the ABCS built, approved by FAA, it 00:34:00just wasn't being used, it was just sitting on the shelf. Somehow, the Phoenix Air VP [vice president] and Will Walters had met up at some previous engagement and word was exchanged, hey, we have--I don't know how it happened, but Will Walters found out that Phoenix Air had this ABCS system that could move infectious patients. So back in July, Will Walters from the Department of State, they came down and looked at the ABCS. I was there that day. They set it up out in the hangar and looked at it, and they set up a contract that day to have a dedicated airplane. CDC has one also, but they have a dedicated airplane with an ABCS sitting on it, ready to go. So now we're getting to Samaritan's Purse.

Q: So the Department of State has their own plane with their own ABCS, is that right?

GOOLSBY: They had a contract with Phoenix Air, so they set it up immediately. But what was different is they had--Phoenix Air had two of these great planes. We had one, so then they got one. Actually, our contract had expired at that time. We had it for about five and a half years. Ours had expired in 2011, but we still had the ABCS that was built. We had a contract with Phoenix Air just to store the ABCS, but not a dedicated airplane.

So the Department of State came down July 8th or something in 2014, came down to Phoenix Air because they found out--they knew we needed to figure out a way to move patients in case they get sick. The US government personnel, in case they get sick treating people with Ebola, we didn't even have a way to move them safely. They found out Phoenix Air had this ABCS, so they flew down to Atlanta, drove to Cartersville, Georgia, and Phoenix Air put it out in the hangar for 00:36:00them to look at. They said, yep, this is good. It probably wasn't their ideal way, but they said this will work in the meantime until we can figure out a better way to move infectious patients, which they did. But they signed that day. They signed a contract with Phoenix Air to have a dedicated G3 plane, one of those gray birds that we had a contract with. At that time ours had expired because we just weren't using our plane enough to justify the expense. And with an ABCS installed in the back of the plane, ready to go, 24/7.

So then comes Kent Brantly, gets sick, Nancy Writebol. Those weren't US government personnel. They were US citizens. What happened, I don't know the ins and outs, but Samaritan's Purse had some type of agreement with the Department of State to where they would pay the Department of State to do this movement 00:37:00because the Department of State, they had the contact with Phoenix Air, so the Department of State told Phoenix Air, hey, go do the trip, move Kent Brantly, Nancy Writebol, and then about forty trips after that. So then Samaritan's Purse, since it was their personnel that got sick and they wanted to move them back to Atlanta, they paid the Department of State and the Department of State paid Phoenix. That's how all that worked. And it worked. They moved them. It was the first time, and I remember I was at home, I was getting all the email traffic just because I was so involved with the inception and creation of the ABCS. I remember watching that live on CNN when the plane flew with Kent Brantly on it, when it flew to Dobbins [Air Reserve Base] in Marietta and they got him on an ambulance and they were bringing him down [Interstate] 75 to Emory for 00:38:00treatment. I think it was on a weekend, I want to say it was Saturday. But they were broadcasting it live on CNN, and here it is, the first Ebola patient ever in the US. The first time they ever had an Ebola patient transported like that, as far as I know. And it worked. No one got sick, and then they went back and got Nancy Writebol and brought her to Emory also. Both of them got well at the treatment facility at Emory University. We didn't have any involvement in the movement of those, but because of our work with that ABCS, they were able to do it.

Q: Were there any other systems that existed for doing something like that before?

GOOLSBY: The only ones I know of, they would have a little coffin-type thing and it was not ideal for moving someone long distances. Our CDC doctors wanted 00:39:00something where it was more of an antechamber. Actually, it's about the size of this room, is what the ABCS is like.

Q: Fourteen-by-ten [feet]?

GOOLSBY: Something like that. Yeah, it's about this size, and you had the sick patient in there, and it had a bed and a portable toilet. But then they would have an antechamber where the medical personnel would go in and gown, de-gown, and go in and treat the patient in-flight. But nothing like that to my knowledge had ever existed. So it was just all over the news, and I remember Dan Thompson at Phoenix Air, when it happened, he was just getting calls from all over the world. Hey, how can we get a system like this? But it was through that three million dollar grant back in 2007, whenever it was, that started all that. Our 00:40:00work, CDC's work, Phoenix Air, and then that team with the military that designed that, is what enabled them to get transported.

We'll follow along with the ABCS, while we're on that. We were in the middle of the Ebola response. It was awful, it was terrible. I tell a lot of people--and this is not much of an exaggeration--for a long period of time, if I wasn't sleeping, I was working. I was getting calls in the middle of the night. It was just crazy. I'm not talking just a weekend. It was a long period of time. My team, it was the same way. We had the case in Texas. The gentleman was in 00:41:00Liberia, and he flew to the US and went to Dallas, and I guess he got Ebola in Liberia, and so when he went to Texas, he got sick and went to the hospital there. I think it was Dallas Presbyterian [note: Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas], I forgot what the hospital was. I told you about how we were moving samples. For three nights in a row--and when you charter an aircraft, it's not like you just go to Fed-Ex, drop off a package and they got it from here. I'm the one coordinating it. I'm the one that's getting approval to use--because you can't just go out and charter an airplane, it comes from the chief operating officer to CDC. It has to go up to her, Sherri [A.] Berger. We had to say, hey, Sherri, we need to charter a plane. We can't use commercial aircraft, we need to get Ebola samples here immediately, and Delta rejected our 00:42:00samples, so we've got to have a surefire, guaranteed method to get these samples here. So I chartered jets three nights in a row, moving samples. You're exhausted because you're working all day, you come home, you work more doing our normal travel stuff, and then you get a call, hey, we've got samples you've got to move. So I had to stop what I'm doing and get approval to use the jet and then to charter jets. Then I'd get on the phone with Phoenix Air and our procurement people, we would make the purchase, and then they would be airborne. I have to coordinate the whole thing. It's not like you can just tell Phoenix Air, hey, I need you to call this guy in Texas, go pick up the samples and bring them back. You're coordinating the whole thing. So I did that three nights in a row. The third night--that night, we didn't get started until like seven o' clock that night. Gary, we've got samples you need to bring back to CDC. So I 00:43:00was up after midnight that night just making sure--coordinating the charter, every leg. When the jet left Texas coming back to Atlanta, it was getting close to landing in Atlanta at PDK [DeKalb-Peachtree Airport] and I had arranged for someone in my--thank goodness he came through for me--but I arranged for him to go meet the plane, pick up the samples, and bring them to CDC and make sure they got put into a refrigerator. It was like twelve thirty, one o' clock, after midnight. I got that done, so I think everything's fine, I'm going to bed. I get up and go to the restroom, I looked at my BlackBerry, and this guy named Toby Merlin--he just passed away--and he was heavy into the response. He was the one 00:44:00I was working with on moving--he was the one that would tell me, we need to move these samples, so he was the one telling me it had to be done. I get an email from Toby at like two in the morning and in all caps--I've still got the email somewhere--and at that time, we had the two nurses who were sick, had Ebola at that hospital--in all caps he said, "NEED TO MOVE TWO SICK PATIENTS TO ATLANTA IMMEDIATELY." Two in the morning. I'm like, I was just exhausted. Because this was in October and we had been going since July nonstop. I just replied back, "Okay," and went back to bed. [laughter] I was about at my melting point at that time. I just went to bed.

I got up in the morning, and on my way into work--I was on a van pool at the 00:45:00time--so I had Will Walters' cell phone number, thank goodness. He's the Department of State MD who was responsible--he had the contract with Phoenix Air. So I got Toby Merlin and Will Walters on the phone, a conference call, and I said, "Hey, Will Waters, we need to use the ABCS immediately." It was Dr. [Thomas R.] Frieden, our director, who was wanting to move the two nurses, and he told Toby Merlin basically to make it happen, and Toby contacted me. So I'm heading down [Interstate] 85 in the morning coming in to work about six, six fifteen in the morning. I got Will Walters, who's Department of State, Toby Merlin here at CDC, and I said, "Will, we need to--" See, Will had the contract with Phoenix Air for the ABCS system, so we needed to get his permission to move these two ladies. Because the hospital, they just weren't equipped to treat these patients. So we had to move them to Atlanta. That's what Dr. Frieden 00:46:00wanted. So I'm heading down 85 at 6:10, 6:15 in the morning. I got Toby Merlin here in Atlanta on the line, I've got Will Walters up in DC on the line and I said, "Will, we need to move the two ladies, the two nurses that have Ebola in Texas, to Atlanta. Today, now, immediately." He said, "Alright, make it happen." So I was kind of done with it. It was very stressful I guess, but other stuff was going on. At that point I was kind of out of it because at that point, Will Walters could talk with Toby Merlin about the patient's condition and all that stuff. So I'm in the team room over in the EOC, and that's where I worked during the response for about--and then we went right into Zika. I was there for a long time. So I'm looking at the TV monitor about noon--that happened about six o' clock in the morning when I put it in motion--and about twelve, one o' clock 00:47:00that afternoon, six or seven hours later, I'm looking live on CNN, you see that gray plane out there in Texas at the airport loading one nurse on there. I was like, wow, it happened that quick. But that's ABCS.

So that was just so great and probably saved a lot of lives. Phoenix Air and Department of State went on to do probably thirty-five, forty missions using that ABCS. Not CDC people, but just people who were over in West Africa who got sick. Either they got sick, they surefire had Ebola, or they had exposure and it's like, okay, they had an exposure, can't put them on a commercial plane because it may be too risky, we don't know if they have Ebola, but we need to move them. So that ABCS, the last I heard, it was used about thirty-five or forty times to move patients.

Q: Were some of them CDC?

GOOLSBY: No. Now, before we started--at the onset of the outbreak, it started in July 2014, so I'm talking August, September--we started sending lots of--so in July, Dr. Frieden sent out an email saying, "We're going to send fifty people to West Africa." That fifty people turned into thousands. [laughter] And it needed to. Between July 2014, April 2016, me and my team, we did 3,208 trips. Not all of them to West Africa. A lot of them. But I'm including all the stuff that I told you about that we did in the US as well. That was just for Ebola.

Some other things that I did prior to this ABCS being utilized were on the onset 00:49:00of the outbreak, it started in July, that's when we started sending people over there. August, September, we'd have teams of people over there in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and we would get a report back that so-and-so has been exposed to a patient who had Ebola. So we're like, okay, what do we do? Couldn't bring them back on a commercial plane, that was just too risky. What if they had Ebola and they could potentially spread it to people on the plane? It's not airborne, you know. So there were a few times that I had to charter jets with Phoenix Air to go pick up these people, these CDC personnel, and bring them back to Atlanta. Thankfully, it turned out they didn't have Ebola, but it was a risky enough situation that they wanted to bring them back on a charter plane, so I would 00:50:00have to charter jets and bring them back on jets.

Q: I have a few questions, just going back and reviewing some of the ACBS stuff. So the contract was allowed to expire in 2011 because you said CDC just wasn't using the plane enough.

GOOLSBY: I think it was 2011. I'll have to check my notes. But we had to sign a five-year contract, and the way contracts typically are assigned, some contracts, [unclear] have one base year, four option years. So if we decided after a year we don't need it, we don't have to resign it, we're not obligated to anything, but if we want to sign again, we can pick up an option year. Our contract was one base year for four option years. We did all four option years, and plus we did a six-month extension. But at that time, it was decided we weren't using the plane enough to justify paying the money we were.

Q: Did not having the contract in place impact how CDC went about the Ebola response activities in 2014? I know the ACBS, you guys were--I guess it was really State who was evacuating Samaritan's Purse people.

GOOLSBY: No, it didn't impact. It all worked out fine. If we would've still had the contract, then yes, we would've been calling the shots rather than the Department of State because they had the contract. But it was better actually that the Department of State had the contract because they're a worldwide footprint, because we were only interested in CDC personnel. Department of State, they're more interested in all US government personnel because it wasn't just CDC deployed over there. You had HHS [US Department of Health and Human 00:52:00Services], military over there and so forth as well.

Q: Do you know if CDC has a contract at the moment?

GOOLSBY: No, we don't. But what we do--and we've had to do it a few times--if we have to charter a jet, we just call Phoenix Air or FlightWorks, whoever, and say we've got an emergency trip, we need to deploy immediately, do you have a jet available, what's your price. That's the way we do it and it seems to work out fine.

Q: So there's the whole ACBS thing, and then there's the massive amount of work 00:53:00you were doing, you said over three thousand trips for Ebola deployers.

GOOLSBY: The ABCS was just a small part, but it had a lot of interesting history behind it, so that's why I went off into that. How it all started and CDC people--doctors were, it's a waste of money, and then what it was able to do. It was great.

Q: Do you know if the ACBS was used to evacuate Ian Crozier later? He was a doctor in Sierra Leone who was one of the sickest people ever to survive Ebola, and evacuated to Emory.

GOOLSBY: I don't remember. Did he survive?

Q: No, no, was it ACBS?

GOOLSBY: Yeah, it had to have been. I think there were like four facilities around the US that could treat such patients with that type of disease. There 00:54:00was one in Nebraska, here at Emory, NIH [National Institutes of Health] up in Maryland, and some other location. I can't remember it now, but I know there were three, I think there were four. But I remember I think they transported one guy to Nebraska and I think he passed away, if I'm not mistaken. Do you remember?

Q: I think that's true.

GOOLSBY: But if someone was transported by air for Ebola during that time, it had to have been by the ABCS. I don't know what else it could've been. As far as I know, that was the only way you could [unclear] someone.

Q: Let's dive into the meat of your work and how you were spending most of your hours in 2014. Was that with--

GOOLSBY: I was over travel and transportation, and we would do--so for travel 00:55:00part, I had a team of four people and they were travel approvers, travel preparers and so forth, and me, and then I had one transportation guy. But the travel--so I work in the Division of Operations. We don't really do routine travel, like if somebody's got to go to a meeting or a conference, we don't do that. We deal in emergencies. Someone's got to deploy immediately for an outbreak or something. And 24/7, if they need to--just say Dr. Joe Brown needs to deploy immediately for an outbreak response on a Saturday. Well, his office is closed, and there's no way to reach the travel preparer, so that's why they call the EOC--because we're 24/7. That's kind of what we do. We're 24/7 emergency travel support. We don't really do that much travel because we're 00:56:00emergency based. So we would do about three or four hundred trips a year internationally and domestic. When Ebola hit, we started doing three or four hundred a month. We were only doing three or four hundred a year, and all of a sudden, we're doing three or four hundred a month, after month, after month. Gradually, it got to where it was in the two hundreds, which is still a lot. Month after month, we were just--we were overwhelmed. We only had five people on our team, and with the volume we were doing, we probably needed fifteen or twenty people to support that.

Thank goodness there was a lady on our team who knew a lot of people in travel around CDC, so she started pulling in people to help us do vouchers. When 00:57:00travelers would come back, they have their voucher paperwork to submit to us, so we could do their vouchers so they could get paid for their travel expenses. Man, the vouchers were piling up, and we were just trying to survive by the second. We had five people on our team, the travel people, and we more than doubled in size. I still don't know if I have an exact count of how many people we had working for us. But we hired some contractors and we got surge people from other CDC CIOs [centers, institutes, and offices] to come over and help us, which was just a blessing, a Godsend. So we got through all that. When it's all said and done, we were activated for Ebola I guess a year and a half or so, but we did, domestic and international, over 3,208 trips is what I have counted. But the thing is, we were still doing some other responses. We're still doing polio 00:58:00response--we were activated for polio and polio response. Then finally as Ebola was--no pun intended--dying down a little bit, the response was slowing down, still busy but slowing down some, the contaminated water thing up in Michigan hit, Flint, Michigan. That was busy. So polio is still going on, Ebola is still going on, then Zika spun up. We had four responses going on at one time. I remember there was one pay period I had seventy-one hours of overtime. That's another thing. Just the amount of overtime I worked was just phenomenal. And not just me, I mean everybody. The amount of hours we worked was just unbelievable. I lost a lot of sleep and I gained twenty-five to thirty pounds. You're sitting 00:59:00here, you can see I'm not Lou Ferrigno, but I'm pretty fit, and I exercise. But when Ebola started, I was either sitting in the EOC all day or sitting at home. When I got home, I would immediately go to my computer at the kitchen table and work till bedtime. You can ask my wife, just about every night. All I was doing was sitting. I wasn't eating good. I gained twenty to twenty-five pounds. I weighed weights that I would've never imagined in my life that I would weigh. We went from Ebola right into Zika, and that was crazy, too, but then once that finally slowed down--this is probably just personal stuff, you don't need--

Q: No, this is important stuff.

GOOLSBY: This is how it impacted my life. I just gained all kinds of weight. I didn't eat good, I didn't exercise, I was so busy with work I didn't have time. What little free time I did have, I just wanted to chill, just do nothing. So 01:00:00finally, Zika slowed down, and I started exercising and lost all that weight back.

Q: Congratulations. That's a lot!

GOOLSBY: It wasn't good, but we were doing good stuff. We were helping getting people where they need to go and getting them home. But health-wise, it wasn't good, so I'm glad that it ended and I could get my weight back to what it was.

Q: Of course, it wasn't just you who was dealing with all this health stuff. Everybody's sitting around gaining weight. Were there ever any efforts to like, get people to stand up and go outside?

GOOLSBY: It's funny you say that. They had this lady from [unclear], the Office of Health and Safety, but I forgot what they're called now. They're in OSSAM [Office of Safety, Security, and Asset Management] now. But she would come around in the logistics room in the EOC and say, "Okay everybody, get up." I 01:01:00think I would do it a few times and just do a little dance or a little exercise just to get us moving so we're not sitting there all the time, stationary--just to break the monotony of it. She would come in and just her smile would help. But to answer your question, yeah. We just didn't have time. We were so busy, it was just crazy, and like I said, it wasn't like--we had had responses where it was H1N1, Hurricane Katrina, where we got killed for a month or two. Then we would still be responding, but it was more manageable. This was not like that. It was day after day, week after week, month after month. It was bad.

Q: Kind of a marathon at a sprint's pace.

GOOLSBY: But like I told you, milestones of my life: getting married, having 01:02:00kids, Ebola response. It was something else.

Q: Can you describe a little bit the place where you typically worked? It was in the EOC, right? What's it like in there, if you can take us inside?

GOOLSBY: I worked in the logistics team room, and during the heat of the response, which was for a long time, we had ten, fifteen, twenty people in there at a time. It was noisy. It really was, it was noisy. I finally moved back. I was on the third floor of the EOC, or Building 21, and I have an office on the fourth floor, but I was absent from my office for four years because I moved down there for Ebola in July, and I didn't like working in that logistics team room because it's just noisy and distracting and you can barely hear people on the phone when you're trying to talk to them. But it was four years before I could go back up, because we kept--okay, we went into Zika, and then there was 01:03:00another response. I finally moved back up to my office. But it was very noisy in that logistics team room, and you have TVs going on and you have people coming in and talking loud. But essentially, you had to be there because that's where all the action was. People would be over on the EOC main floor and they would come over to me in logistics and say, hey, I need to fly to so-and-so now. Okay, let's get on the phone with Omega [World Travel], get your airline ticket, and you're boom, out the door. Or move samples or whatever. But I had to be there.

Q: Can you also describe some of the people you spent the most time working with?

GOOLSBY: I worked well with our travel agent, Omega. Never met him in person, but on the phone. We were constantly on the phone with him all the time, getting airline tickets for travelers back and forth to Africa and the US. Omega; my team; of course, worked with Deployment Coordination. You mentioned Don [Donald] 01:04:00Flowers earlier. He works in a group called Deployment Coordination. I worked with him a lot. What they would do is kind of email out--the task forces within the Ebola response, there were several different task forces for whatever, countermeasures, whatever it was, hospital infection, whatever it was. They would send a request to Deployment Coordination, hey, we need to deploy this person to West Africa or wherever. So the Department Coordination would make sure that that person they wanted to deploy was current on all their training and had visas, passports, all that stuff. Then once they checked all the boxes, then they would send Deployment Coordination, which was Don Flowers, Gray Smithson, they would send out an email, so-and-so needs to deploy to Monrovia, Liberia, for thirty days, beginning in three days or whatever. Then we would act 01:05:00on that request. It was our job. It was their job just to make sure they were good to go, had all the trainings and certifications, clinic visits and passports and stuff like that. But then once they emailed it out, it was our job to get them there.

Q: So since you had Omega in place, does that mean you didn't have to deal with finding the airlines as much?

GOOLSBY: No, they took care of that. We would call and say, hey, Sam Robson needs to deploy in two days to Freetown, Sierra Leone, and so they would put them on--and here's another thing. We were the hub. In typical international travel, day-to-day routine international travel at CDC, the traveler will call Omega and get the airline ticket. But in the EOC, we do that, for a few reasons. 01:06:00One, so that we know the traveler's whereabouts. If someone comes to us and says, "How many people do you have deployed at Sierra Leone?" "Well, I don't know, we don't really know." We control the airline tickets so that way we know where everybody's at. We control their move. A lot of work for us, but it's very beneficial so when the director wants to know, how many people do we have in Sierra Leone, Liberia? We can tell him because we know. Because we control their movements, we have the airline tickets. Another reason that it was very beneficial for us during the Ebola response to control the airline tickets was for those three countries, especially Sierra Leone, I think actually all of them, they got into a routine. In each one of these countries, they would have as much as seventy, eighty, ninety people deployed there at a time in each country, if not more. But they got into a routine and said, we want incoming 01:07:00people from Atlanta to only come in on these days; outbound, going out only on these days, and that way we could control it. Whereas if you had the deployers calling Omega, they would be coming in all different days. We knew what airlines to use on what days for them to arrive, so we could control that back here at home base. We were getting that information from our logistics people out in the field, hey, this is what airline you need to come in on, on what day, what flights. We would make it happen. Whereas if we left it up to the travelers to call Omega and get their airline ticket, they wouldn't do it.

I'll tell you another big thing that really was a lot of work. We were sending deployers like crazy, as you know, over to West Africa. But what we would do is, CDC is based in Atlanta, but we have CDC offices and personnel all around the 01:08:00US. They would bring CDC personnel who may be like a field assignee in Iowa or Oregon or wherever; they would say, okay, you have this expertise we need in West Africa, you're going to be deployed there. First, you need to come to Atlanta, and you need to go to the clinic and get your physical, you need to go to the equipment room, Irene White, get all your equipment you're going to need. We would have to organize getting them from wherever they were in the US to Atlanta, stay two to three days, then they would have to go--everybody that went to West Africa had to have a briefing. They would have to go to an Ebola briefing, mandatory. They had to go to this briefing. They'd have to come to Atlanta to get their briefing, get their equipment, go to the clinic visits, get their visa passports. We had to organize getting them from their home state to Atlanta to stay two, three, four days, sometimes longer, and then over to West Africa, and then they could just go straight from West Africa back to--so that 01:09:00was a headache.

Q: When you're describing one of those benefits of having you guys schedule all the flights and that means we can have certain days which are deployer intake days, deployer outtake days. That just makes so much sense to me immediately because then you can have scheduled times for larger group briefings and debriefings and not having to do it for all the individuals whenever they're coming in, willy nilly.

GOOLSBY: Exactly. They would have the briefings, the Ebola brief, they would have them on certain days. So we had to marry up, hey, you need to come to Atlanta on this day because the briefing is only two days a week. Every now and then, it just couldn't work out, so they would have to have a one-off briefing and then do a one-on-one, but for the most part it worked out. We got into a routine. But you've got to remember, a lot of the military people that we had 01:10:00hired, this is what they did in the military. They knew this stuff. Stuff like this was new to me.

Q: Who did you work with especially much who was a military person?

GOOLSBY: DEO, Division of Emergency Operations, and are you familiar with Strategic National Stockpile?

Q: Yes.

GOOLSBY: They actually are going up to be [unclear] just now, but those are two entities at CDC that are heavily military, retired military. Not all, but heavily retired military.

Q: So those guys are kind of used to logistics work.

GOOLSBY: Oh, yeah. Plans, operations, logistics, all that stuff.

Q: When you're bringing people from around the United States to Atlanta first before they ship out to West Africa or wherever, do you also have to find lodging for them?

GOOLSBY: Yeah. So we would put them--the best place would be the Emory 01:11:00Conference Center because it's right across the street. But a lot of times it was booked up or over per diem, so we would put them at the Executive Park Courtyard Marriott; the DoubleTree Hilton, which is just across 85 on North Druid Hills Road; Century Center Marriott sometimes; places like that, and there were a couple of hotels in Decatur. It's funny you say that. The good thing about--you want to be busy, but you don't want to be overwhelmed for that long of a time. We would have new experiences come up, and I went, hey, this has come up, and we would develop a plan to fix this, but I would have very little time, downtime, I had to do it on the weekends, to write up plans and new scenarios and new ideas. You mentioned, where do we put them in Atlanta? I had to work on 01:12:00it over the course of two or three weekends because I just didn't have time, but I did up a spreadsheet that listed all the hotels in Atlanta, how far away they were from CDC, what their prices were, and whether they had a free shuttle service, so we wouldn't have to issue a rental car. If the hotel had a free shuttle service, they could bring them to CDC. I did a spreadsheet up, but it took two or three weekends to do it because I was so busy.

Q: Did some of that stuff you built--

GOOLSBY: We still use it, yeah. And the same thing with Zika. We had stuff come up with Zika that was new to us, we'd never experienced it in travel, but we would develop SOPs [standard operating procedures] and stuff like that, that we still use today. You don't want to get killed and overwhelmed on responses, but the good thing is you learn stuff that you can apply to future responses, and it makes future responses much easier.

Q: That makes a lot of sense. I had my own little questions, but if you had the 01:13:00stuff that you--anything written down that you wanted to make sure--

GOOLSBY: Another interesting thing is back when I was doing the charters. Remember, the Ebola response was heavy in the news. We had CNN, Fox News, all of them out here at the entrance with their big satellite trucks. It was nationwide news, the Ebola response. I would look out my window at the EOC and see them all. We had reporters in the EOC and stuff. The White House had told CDC that any time you need jets, let us know. So we chartered the jets for Texas. I told you about how I chartered the jets three nights in a row, moving samples. After the Texas situation, the White House had told our CDC leadership, any time you need jets, let us know. An Ebola case pops up in New York, so we used the White 01:14:00House jet. I coordinated it. Sherri Berger was chief operating officer. I was on the phone with her, and she put me in touch with the point of contact for the White House jet, so we used it. We used it to transport CDC--when they first had the case up in New York--in Ebola, when you found out you had cases, you had to move people then. I mean now. It was gone. It's not like, okay, in two days we're going to--no, it was now. So that afternoon, at least a day in the office for wrapping up because I would work on my van pool on the ride home, and right when I get home I'd log on and work till bedtime. But that day, we got wind of a case up in New York and said, Gary, we need to get these three people up to New York now. So I got them airline tickets through Omega, but then they said, hold 01:15:00on, we're going to contact the White House or however it worked, to look at using one of their jets. That came to fruition, so I worked with--it was funny, I was at home, so we used the jet, and man, they flew down to Hartsfield-[Jackson Atlanta International Airport]. We should've had them fly to PDK. They were the ones that said--actually, it was the military. I forgot where they were at, but they operated the White House jets. They said it was Michelle Obama's plane, she used it, I don't know. But it was Gulfstream IV. They said, okay, the jet is departing DC, I guess it was at Andrews Air Force Base, and it's going to be down at Hartsfield at such-and-such a time. So then I cancelled my airline tickets for the three that we were deploying up there, so I said, "Guys, we're getting the White House jet. Go down to Hartsfield--this is where 01:16:00you're going to need to go." Man, in hindsight, I should've told them to go to PDK, but I decided, okay, if that's where you want to go, we'll go. So we got them on the jet. It took a while. There was something wrong, I can't remember what--it was delayed a while, but we finally got them airborne and up there. But we wanted to bring samples back, so once the plane landed up there, then I had to coordinate--while they're in the air, I'm trying to coordinate getting samples to the airport. I forgot what the name of the airport was that we use up there. Teterboro [Airport], I think is what it was, or LaGuardia [Airport]. I can't remember what it was, but anyway, I'm coordinating getting samples ready so that when the plane lands, we can just load the samples and head the plane right back to Atlanta with the Ebola samples. It was the [US] Air Force people that were responsible for these planes, and once they got wind that you're bringing Ebola samples back to Atlanta, they pitched a fit because I don't think 01:17:00they knew that was going to be the scenario. They call me, and it was some high-ranking military people, and they were like, "You're going to bring what back on our plane?" I go, "Ebola samples." So we had to go through, and you remember I told you earlier how Phoenix Air, or any basic charter company, they really weren't concerned about all the dangers because paperwork, because it was a charter plane. But the military people, they wanted it. So I had to make sure--thank goodness the lady at the hospital where the patient was, she was DG certified, dangerous goods certified, so she knew how to package it, do the paperwork. Thank goodness, because the military people wanted that paperwork and they wanted to make sure the package was packaged properly and labeled properly. So that worked out very well. They weren't too happy about that, but it all worked out okay, so we got the sample here. That was something I thought about, 01:18:00the interaction with the White House that I had and using their jet. It seems like we used it another time. I know we used it once, but I could've sworn we used it another time. I have to go back and look. I was trying to look through my notes and see if there was anything else. I think that's about it.

Q: One person I wish I had had in here--and the project is pretty much over, I won't be able to get her in here--is Sherri Berger. Did you work pretty closely with her?

GOOLSBY: Only on the charters.

Q: What was your experience like?

GOOLSBY: Great. Very, very approachable. Very helpful.

Q: Can you talk about, you mentioned coming back in the van pool and working at home all these hours, and just kind of the effect of your work on the family life?

GOOLSBY: Yeah. It wasn't good. It was like I was at home but I wasn't. For a long period of time, it was like I was at home but I wasn't. Then when we would go out to eat or to go do something, I always, always had my phone with me, so if something came up, I had to deal with it. But yeah, it wasn't good on my family. I remember my wife just--we had never been on a cruise before, and she 01:20:00booked a cruise just to get me away because when you're out in the ocean, you have no cell phone service. We took a trip and I worked on my vacation. My wife and I went and stayed a few nights at a condo in Panama City, and I think we stayed four nights, and I told her, Melanie, I'll only work--we had an agreement--I'm only going to work, even on vacation I'll only work three to four hours a day and that's it, and I'll try my best to stop. The email volume, the emails were just unbelievable. When I was doing this, if you did not go home and get a handle on your emails, for lack of better words, you were screwed the next day. If you took a night off, you paid for it the next day and thereafter. We would get anywhere from a thousand to fifteen hundred emails a day. Now, they 01:21:00weren't all anything you had to answer, but what it was is you're on different functional boxes. I was on a log sheet functional box, I was on a travel functional box, and then I was getting emails to my personal Gary Goolsby box. It was overwhelming. What I did is I kept a spreadsheet of all of our travel. That was our database, that was our life flow, was that spreadsheet because it helped us keep track of who we deployed, who was currently deployed, and then who we had on deck to be deployed. So when I told you Gray Smithson and Don Flowers, when they would send out these emails, what I'd do is take that email and log it into our spreadsheet so I knew who we'd have upcoming. The amount of emails was unbelievable. I had anywhere from a thousand to fifteen hundred emails a day. So you try to manage it as best you could, dealing with phone calls and all that stuff. But then if you didn't go home and work and clean up 01:22:00your emails, you were screwed the next day. Because I would go to bed--work every night, every night, every weekend, every holiday, and it was just so important that you stayed caught up on emails or you were doomed. I lived for the weekends because it was a little slower on the weekends. It got to where there was no difference between a weekend and weekday. It was terrible. I worked Christmas Day, Thanksgiving Day, New Year's Day. A lot of people did, I mean everybody did. It was just, this is the way it was. But I would go to bed, I'd work, I'd try to clean up. Most of the time, I wouldn't get completely caught up on emails, but I'd just do the best I could, I just wanted to go to bed. I'd go to bed, and you know in West Africa, they're six or seven hours ahead of us, so when I wake up at five in the morning, I've already got a slew of emails of 01:23:00things I need to do before I even get to the office. The logistics people in West Africa, the three countries, "Gary, this person needs to change their flight."

There were a few cases where people were deployed and it just didn't work out. Personalities didn't work out. I didn't get into all what it was, but they probably weren't doing the job they needed to be doing, so I would work with the team leads over there. They'd say, "Gary, this is very confidential, we need to get this person back there, they're not working out." So what I would have to do is I would have to work with them and say, okay, the next flight is out of there from Liberia on these days, they'd say okay. So what I would have to do is book 01:24:00them on a flight, and when the Omega itinerary would come through, we would go to the EOC travel box, which it would hit me and my team, but it would also go to the traveler. So when we were going to kind of work out one of these, you're going home, I would have to tell Omega, book their flights for this day--tomorrow, today, next day, whenever--but you're going to have to take their name off the email so they won't know. So then Omega would send out the new airline ticket for them, I would get it, but the traveler, their email address was wiped so they wouldn't see that they were leaving this afternoon. So then I would send the itinerary to the person that requested that we get this person out of there for whatever reason, and then that person would go and talk to the person who was being sent home and say, sorry, it's not working out, we're sending you home, you need to go check out of your hotel today, we've got a 01:25:00flight home for you this afternoon. We did a few of those. That was pretty interesting, too.

We had some people that fell. They had two or three people that fell and broke their legs. One person hit their head, I think two people had leg injuries. The Department of State, remember I told you they do medevacs. So they would medevac them and get them from--for some reason it was Liberia. Everybody's getting hurt in Liberia. This wasn't like exposure to Ebola, this was just people getting hurt. The Department of State would charter a jet, which typically was Phoenix, but it wasn't on the ABCS, it would be a charter jet. They would fly them from Liberia to London, and they would get treated, get their leg surgery or whatever, and then once they got well enough, then I would have to fly them commercially from London to Atlanta, back home. That's where I would come back into play. There was another guy who went over there and got sick, and come to 01:26:00find out it was cancer. So they medevacked him from Liberia to London, and he was in the hospital there for a while. He got well enough that I could fly him from London to home commercially. We flew him in business class with his wife. He died a little while later. Went back to Atlanta.

Just a lot of interesting stuff that goes on. You talked about who we worked with. We worked a lot with--there's a group over in financial management called Travel Policy. They're very good at, you know, when we asked them, hey, are we allowed to do this with travel regulations? Can we or can we not do this? We would have to engage with them a lot to see if we were allowed to do something or not, so that was very helpful. It was a very interesting experience. But like 01:27:00I said, we rolled right into Ebola--I mean right into Zika. It wasn't quite as excruciating as Ebola, but Zika was hot and heavy for a while.

Q: Were there some key ways in which it was similar and different from Ebola?

GOOLSBY: The thing with Zika, remember how we would have those situations during Ebola where we had to charter jets, we had to move Ebola patients, we had to move samples, like, now. We had to deploy people immediately. Zika wasn't like that because it was more of a, women who were pregnant had this virus, and it would be a birth defect. That's what it was. But we had a lot of travel for Zika on short notice to some South American countries like Columbia, and I know we 01:28:00sent a lot of people to Puerto Rico and then to the US Virgin Islands and to Guam, American Samoa. Finally, it slowed down. After going hot and heavy for three or four years, you almost felt a little guilty for having a break because we were so busy working. But it was nice. We were still working, still busy doing the response and stuff, but not at the magnitude that we were.

Q: I know there were some exposures of CDC staff, they'd worked with somebody who came down with Ebola virus disease and then decided they needed to come back to the US. Were you involved in setting up any of that, or who was that?

GOOLSBY: Before the ABCS was used, yes, I did move people back home using chartered jets. They would have an exposure, and the leadership personnel in that country, whether it was Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia. Okay, this was a risky enough exposure where we don't want to put this person on a commercial aircraft back home and potentially expose passengers on a plane. But they wanted to get them back home, so we had to charter a jet to bring them home. And of course we would have to tell the charter company, this is what's going on, just so you know.

Q: Was that Phoenix Air generally too?

GOOLSBY: Yeah. I think we used another company one time, but we used Phoenix Air. There weren't a lot of those, maybe three or four, five.

Q: How did the increased infrastructure around customs and the traveler 01:30:00screening and stuff, how did that impact your work?

GOOLSBY: That's another thing, now that you mentioned it, I forgot about that. They designated five airports that anybody who traveled--anybody coming to the US who had been in those three countries had to come in through one of five airports: Atlanta, JFK [John F. Kennedy International Airport], Dulles [International Airport], Chicago [O'Hare International Airport], Newark [Liberty International Airport], I think, were the five airports. We had to send CDC personnel, train them. I didn't do the training. We had to deploy them to these cities, and they did screening. They would screen these people, ask them 01:31:00questions. Someone would come in from one of these countries, I forgot what they called them, but they were CDC personnel and they would ask the people questions. I think they checked their temperature and stuff. My team was responsible--that was another group we had to deal with, we had to travel those people, deal with that.

Q: We've taken up a lot of your morning.

GOOLSBY: I didn't mean to talk as long as I have.

Q: This has been a total privilege to have you in here. Because this is stuff that, as I said, it's coming to the end of this project, and every new person I still talk to still adds this huge element, and you've done that today.

GOOLSBY: I hope it wasn't a waste of time.

Q: [laughs] Quite the opposite. You mentioned major life events: getting married, Ebola. When you do look back on it now, how does it feel?

GOOLSBY: Well, it was very rewarding that we did that. Sorry that eleven thousand people died in West Africa, over eleven thousand people. But if we didn't get--I feel certain that if we didn't get CDC people over there who had the expertise in containing the spread of this disease and the know-how, if we didn't get them over there, who knows what could have happened. Hell, it could have been maybe hundreds of thousands of people and spread worldwide. Which it did, I think it spread up into Europe and spread to the US. It could've been even worse. So I think it was very rewarding that we got the responders over to 01:33:00West Africa to do what they needed to do and back home. It was rewarding. It was very trying times for me and a lot of people, my team, everybody in the response community, it certainly was. But it was very rewarding to do that.

Q: Thank you, Gary Goolsby, for being here with me today. I'm telling you, this was a total privilege to hear about your experiences. So thank you.

GOOLSBY: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

END