Ike Devastates University, Spares New Press

The in-plant had just installed its long-awaited DI press. Then the hurricane struck.

November 2008 By Bob Neubauer

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IT HAD been a test of perseverance, and Otis Johnson had finally won.

Three years ago, the manager of Printing and Graphic Services at the University of Texas Medical Branch put in a proposal for a direct imaging offset press. He had analyzed the amount of short-run, four-color work his in-plant was producing on two-color Heidelbergs and decided a DI press would be the perfect solution.

But before his proposal could be approved, the university president retired. The interim administration would not act on it, so Johnson waited patiently.

When the new president came on board, Johnson tried again. This time he got the green light. So he ordered a Presstek 34DI press, along with a Dimension 800 computer-to-plate system, to make plates for the shop’s two Heidelbergs and three ABDick duplicators.

In September, after three years of waiting, the installation was finally complete, and training began.

“My operators, their eyes were glowing when they saw that four-color quality that it was putting out,” Johnson recalls. “It was a happy time—until September 11.”

That was the day employees were forced to evacuate the city of Galveston. Because while installation and training were going on, Hurricane Ike was gathering steam over the nearby Gulf of Mexico. Johnson and his staff had no choice but to cover up the equipment in their second-floor in-plant, move everything away from the windows and head out of town. Johnson fled inland where he watched the destruction of Galveston Island on television.

“It was eerie to be sitting somewhere else watching the waves crash and the water rise,” he recalls. The storm surge brought up to 12 feet of water into the city, he says. “It was unbelievable.”

A Long, Tense Wait

As he watched, all he could think about was that new equipment he had waited so long to get.

“That’s the main thing that was on my mind,” he says. “If the windows were breached in some sort of way, my shop would have been shot. It would have been devastated.”

After the storm moved on, Johnson returned to his home near Galveston, but still he could not get any news about how his in-plant had fared. No one was permitted back on the island for a week. “I was pulling my hair out,” he says.