By Mark Zaborney
The Blade, Toledo
TOLEDO, Ohio — Churton Budd, a paramedic, nurse, and information systems analyst, who provided perspective and care while leading a Toledo-based team to areas ravaged by hurricanes and other disasters, died Thursday at University of Toledo Medical Center, the former Medical College of Ohio Hospital. He was 52.
He suffered multi-system failure, his wife, Terry, said. He had health problems in recent years and in 2015 left positions he had at ProMedica and at UTMC.
Mr. Budd worked on the scene of disasters, and afterward educated others about emergency response, often in league with teammates Kelly Burkholder-Allen and Dr. Paul Rega. He was a former commander and deputy commander of the Toledo Area Disaster Medical Assistance Team.
Over three and a half days in Florida after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the Toledo team treated the cuts, gashes, and other minor injuries of 3,300 people. The Toledo team arrived on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricane Marilyn in 1995 and ran a hospital in tents. Ground Zero of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City left a lasting impression.
“It’s like you’re going to the big bull’s eye and standing on the circle in the middle,” Mr. Budd told The Blade.
So did the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Covington, La., where the Toledo team was sent. Team members worked 12-hour shifts inside a special-needs shelter at the high school. When Mr. Budd could venture out, he was stunned by what he saw.
“You couldn’t go to a neighborhood and not see damage,” Mr. Budd told The Blade.
People across the country knew Mr. Budd, Ms. Burkholder-Allen said.
“We spent many years deploying to disasters, but we taught many classes in disaster management,” said Ms. Burkholder-Allen, who worked with Mr. Budd in the emergency room of Medical College Hospital in the mid-1980s.
“He was a great bear of a man,” she said. “He was always calm. And part of the magic of working in an emergency department or working at a disaster is you don’t lose your cool and you see the forest for the trees. You have to give things a micro and macro look, and he was capable of doing that. He was soft spoken and gentle and extremely genuine.”
He’d worked in medical and health-care settings for decades. He was close to his parents, Dr. Neilma Budd, of the MCO pathology department, and G. Colin Budd, an MCO physiology professor. He’d been an MCO laboratory technician. He’d also been a paramedic in MCO’s mobile intensive care unit and was an emergency nurse at MCO.
For entertainment, he took apart computers and put them back together, Ms. Burkholder-Allen said. At MCO and UTMC he was a systems analyst and manager and worked in clinical informatics at ProMedica.
He was born Nov. 24, 1963, in London. The family came to the United States about three years later. Mr. Budd became a U.S. citizen on Sept. 17, 1999.
He was a 1982 graduate of St. John’s Jesuit High School. He attended Bowling Green State University and studied biology and nursing at UT, from which he had a bachelor’s degree.
Surviving are his wife, the former Terry Dorfmeister; daughters, Alysse and Brianna Budd; parents Neilma and Geoffrey Colin Budd; sister, Philippa Morgan, and brothers, Stephen and Benjamin Budd.
The family will receive guests from 4-8 p.m. Monday at Newcomer Funeral Home on Heatherdowns Boulevard, with a Rosary service at 7 p.m. Memorial services will be at 10 a.m. Tuesday in St. Patrick of Heatherdowns Church.
The family suggests tributes to the Sparrow’s Nest or the American Red Cross.
Copyright 2016 The Blade