When a windstorm ripped through Storm Lake, Iowa, in April, tearing the roof off the local dialysis center, Carla Jones feared for her life even from the safety of her home.
Jones, 68, is in kidney failure. Dialysis keeps patients like her alive. The dialysis machine she hooked up to three times a week at the center near her home filtered excess liquid and toxins out of her blood, functioning like the kidneys inside her that no longer work.
But the machines are susceptible to disasters, which knock out power lines that make the machines function, damage water plants whose output is essential to treatment and flood roads that patients and staffers use to get to treatment centers.
When Jones learned her local treatment center was forced to close, she panicked.
