Health 
 
 Firestone Did What Governments Have Not: Stopped Ebola In Its Tracks 
 
 i itoggle caption John W. Poole/NPR John W. Poole/NPR 
 
 i itoggle caption John W. Poole/NPR John W. Poole/NPR 
 
 The classic slogan for Firestone tires was "where the rubber meets the road." 
 
 When it comes to Ebola, the rubber met the road at the Firestone rubber plantation in Harbel, Liberia. 
 
 Harbel is a company town not far from the capital city of Monrovia. It was named in 1926 after the founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Harvey and his wife, Idabelle. Today, Firestone workers and their families make up a community of 80,000 people across the plantation. 
 
 Firestone detected its first Ebola case on March 30, when an employee's wife arrived from northern Liberia. She'd been caring for a disease-stricken woman and was herself diagnosed with the disease. Since then Firestone has done a remarkable job of keeping the virus at bay. It built its own treatment center and set up a comprehensive response that's managed to quickly stop transmission. Dr. Brendan Flannery, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's team in Liberia, has hailed Firestone's efforts as resourceful, innovative and effective. 
 
 Currently the only Ebola cases on the sprawling, 185-square-mile plantation are in patients who come from neighboring towns. 
 
 Long rows of dappled rubber trees cover Harbel's landscape. Prevailing winds cause the adult trees to lean westward. Back when Firestone was still based in Ohio, employees used to joke that the trees are "bowing to Akron." 
 
 When the Ebola case was diagnosed, "we went in to crisis mode," recalls Ed Garcia, the managing director of Firestone Liberia. He redirected his entire management structure toward Ebola. 
 
 i itoggle caption John W. Poole/NPR John W. Poole/NPR 
 
 Garcia's team first tried to find a hospital in the capital to care for the woman. "Unfortunately, at that time, there was no facility that could accommodate her," he says. "So we quickly realized that we had to handle the situation ourselves." 
 
 The case was detected on a Sunday. Garcia and a medical team from the company hospital spent Monday setting up an Ebola ward. Tuesday the woman was placed in isolation. 
 
 "None of us had any Ebola experience," he says. They scoured the Internet for information about how to treat Ebola. They cleared out a building on the hospital grounds and set up an isolation ward. They grabbed a bunch of hazmat suits for dealing with chemical spills at the rubber factory and gave them to the hospital staff. The suits worked just as well for Ebola cases. 
 
 Firestone immediately quarantined the woman's family. Like so many Ebola patients, she died soon after being admitted to the ward. But no one else at Firestone got infected: not her family and not the workers who transported, treated and cared for her. 
 
 The Firestone managers had the benefit of backing and resources of a major corporation — something the communities around them did not. 
 
 Firestone didn't see another Ebola case for four months. Then in August, as the epidemic raced through the nearby capital, patients with Ebola started appearing at the one hospital and several clinics across the giant rubber plantation. The hospital isolation ward was expanded to 23 beds and a prefab annex was built. Containing Ebola became the number-one priority of the company. Schools in the town, which have been closed by government decree, were transformed into quarantine centers. Teachers were dispatched for door-to-door outreach. 
 
 Hundreds of people with possible exposure to the virus were placed under quarantine. Seventy-two cases were reported. Forty-eight were treated in the hospital and 18 survived. By mid-September the company's Ebola treatment unit was nearly full. 
 
 As of this weekend, however, only three patients remained: a trio of boys age 4, 9 and 17. 
 
 "So we have these three," says Dr. Benedict Wollor, coordinator for the Ebola treatment unit at Firestone. "We are concerned because by this morning the 4-year-old was just crying." 
 
 A team is getting dressed in full body suits, gloves and goggles to enter the ward: a doctor, two nurses and a man with an agricultural sprayer full of disinfectant strapped to his back. Wollor says the team has a lot of work to do before they get overheated in their industrial spacesuits. 
 
 i itoggle caption John W. Poole/NPR John W. Poole/NPR 
 
 "They have to change Pampers, bedding, even bathe them," says Wollor. "Make sure they're clean. If someone is dehydrated, open an IV line. Imagine how we maintain an IV line on a kid." 
 
 These three boys all came from outside the plantation. So even as the worst Ebola outbreak ever recorded rages all around them, Firestone appears to have blocked the virus from spreading inside its territory. 
 
 Dr. Flannery of the CDC says a key reason for Firestone's success is the close monitoring of people who have potentially been exposed to the virus — and the moving of anyone who has had contact with an Ebola patient into voluntary quarantine. 
 
 By most accounts, this Ebola outbreak remains out of control, with health care workers across West Africa struggling to contain it. 
 
 Asked what's needed to turn that around, Flannery says, "More Firestones" — places that have the money, resources and unwavering determination to stop Ebola. ||||| An Ebola survivor spoke to a group at Firestone, including Medical Director Lyndon Mabande, in yellow shirt. Glenna Gordon for The Wall Street Journal 
 
 FIRESTONE, Liberia—As Ebola exploded here this year, a rubber farm embarked on a crash course on how to tame an epidemic that has killed thousands of people and derailed governments across West Africa. 
 
 One morning in March, when the first case arrived at the Liberian unit of Japan’s Bridgestone Corp. 5108.TO +1.15% Bridgestone Corp. Japan: Tokyo ¥3,530 +40 +1.15% Volume (Delayed 20m) : 1.34M P/E Ratio 12.16 Market Cap ¥2,837.73 Billion Dividend Yield 2.27% Rev. per Employee ¥24,913,400 10/06/14 Liberian Rubber Farm Becomes S... 09/01/14 Companies Are Taking Longer to... More quote details and news » 5108.TO in Your Value Your Change Short position , managers sat around a rubber-tree table and googled “Ebola,” said Ed Garcia, president of Firestone Natural Rubber Company LLC. Then they built two Ebola isolation clinics, using shipping containers and plastic wrap. They trained their janitors how to bury Ebola corpses. Their agricultural surveyors mapped the virus as it spread house to house, and teachers at the company’s schools went door-to-door to explain the disease. 
 
 “It was like flying an airplane and reading the manual at the same time,” said Philippines-born Mr. Garcia, who runs this 185-square-mile stretch of rubber trees. 
 
 Six months later, Firestone has turned the tide of infections, offering a sanctuary of health in a country where cases are doubling every three weeks. 
 
 Ebola’s broader threat was illustrated on Monday, when a Spanish medical worker tested positive for Ebola after treating an Africa-based missionary who had been infected with the virus and flown to Madrid, officials said. It was the first suspected transmission outside West Africa. 
 
 The virus could flare again at Firestone. But as of last week, not a single known infection was left among the company’s 8,500 employees and their 71,500 dependents. 
 
 The company’s Ebola clinic, which boasts amenities such as ceiling fans, was empty last Wednesday. The head doctor, Lyndon Mabande, expressed relief that his staff didn’t risk being infected by a mistaken needle prick. 
 
 An hour’s drive from here, in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, clinics are packed, and scores are dying daily. The difference isn’t that Firestone applied any breakthrough tactics in fighting a virus first identified four decades ago, health experts and company officials said. It is that the rubber company had the money, manpower, and organization to tackle an epidemic that several sovereign West African governments found bewildering. 
 
 More than 3,400 people have died in West Africa, according to the latest figures from the World Health Organization. Many times that number have died at home, infecting their families without entering a clinic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Every hour, five people in Sierra Leone are infected, said British charity Save The Children last week. 
 
 Mary Carter, who survived Ebola after receiving care at the Firestone clinic, walks home for the first time alongside Lyndon Mabande, the plant’s medical director. Glenna Gordon for The Wall Street Journal 
 
 While the viral infection has exposed how weak health care in West Africa is, it has also revealed a widening gulf between the facilities of these governments and the resource companies on which they depend. A 14-year-long war left both this nation and the Firestone rubber farm in ruins. A decade later, it is Firestone that has rebuilt. 
 
 The contagion has escalated beyond what West African governments can manage. Troops and medics from the U.S. and U.K.—even tiny Cuba—have arrived to help build and staff clinics. The Ebola epidemic is edging toward the borders of Mali, Guinea-Bissau and Ivory Coast, said health experts, another trio of countries recovering from civil wars. 
 
 Ebola is now in every county of Liberia. It is also just across the river from the Firestone farm, as the company’s president illustrated by dragging a laser pointer along a map. “There are villages here that are getting wiped out,” Mr. Garcia said. 
 
 Related Video As Spain reports the first case of ebola contracted outside of West Africa, how can the disease be stopped from spreading? UPMC infectious disease expert Dr. Amesh Adalja joins the News Hub. Photo: Getty. 
 
 Nearly a century ago, at the dawn of the automobile age, Liberia staked its future on rubber. The men who governed this land, descendants of freed American slaves, took out huge debts to Firestone. Here in Africa, they hoped to erect a modern, industrial republic, modeled off America. 
 
 Instead, Liberia fell into insolvency, then, in 1989, a civil war. It ended 14 years later with 250,000 lives lost. A third of the population fled, according to the United Nations, and those who returned found a country plundered. Many bombed-out government buildings were left roofless. 
 
 Firestone’s company hospital sat roofless, too, when its managers returned to the property at war’s end. Even the elevators had been looted from their shafts. Trees had been so poorly cared for that the farm, the world’s biggest contiguous rubber plantation, may not return to its 1989 output until 2032, said Mr. Garcia. 
 
 And yet the Firestone plantation a decade later is, in some ways, a microcosm of the America in Africa Liberia’s founders had envisioned. In a country where children walk to school over muddy paths, high-school students here board big yellow school buses, winding over country roads. Electricity flows from a private dam. Water towers, telephone poles, speed-limit signs and brick homes—all exceedingly rare in tropical Africa—stare out over mowed hillsides that resemble the landscape outside Nashville, Tenn., where Firestone’s head office is based. 
 
 The Ebola ‘war room’ at the Firestone rubber farm in Liberia, where executives strategized to fight the epidemic on the property. 
 
 “We made everything from a U.S. model,” said Mr. Garcia, driving his pickup truck past a pink brick courthouse the company built. 
 
 Outside this farm, Liberia has hardly rebuilt. 
 
 Before Ebola struck, this country had the second-lowest ratio of doctors to people on earth, according to the WHO. Today, there are probably more Liberian doctors in the U.S. than in Liberia, said Lewis Brown, the country’s information minister. The physicians who stay start from $1,000 a month at government hospitals and lack the most basic supplies, such as rubber gloves. 
 
 These shortcomings offered a fertile environment for an epidemic. On Sunday, March 23, Guinea confirmed the first case of Ebola in the region, just across the border from Liberia. A week later, on a Sunday night, a call came in for the top doctor at the Firestone hospital: An Ebola patient had escaped from a clinic in northern Liberia to the house of her husband, an employee living on the farm. 
 
 “You got trouble on you!” Dr. Mabande recalls a Liberian health official shouting into the phone. 
 
 By Monday afternoon, the company’s managers had designed a basic clinic, and raided the company warehouse to confirm that the suits used to clean up rubber-related chemical spills would work as Ebola-resistant medical garb, too. 
 
 By Tuesday, they had admitted their first patient. She died while her husband and children were held under isolation in employee housing. 
 
 Firestone employs 8,500 people at its plant in Liberia. Glenna Gordon for The Wall Street Journal 
 
 As Liberian senators argued about whether Ebola was a scam to solicit more foreign aid, Firestone quietly built its own corporate health infrastructure. It converted pickup trucks to ambulances. Firestone’s company police, normally tasked with chasing rubber thieves, were given orders to enforce a “No Visitors” policy. 
 
 The heads of payroll, maintenance and special projects created an Ebola war room, where they field calls from nervous workers living in the forest. The in-house radio station broadcasts interviews with survivors, who entertain their fellow employees with stories of their ordeals. 
 
 “I was unable to lift a plastic bottle of water,” said Levi Zeopueger, recounting his sickest moments. “Can you imagine?” 
 
 Liberians just outside the farm have watched all this in frustration. Marcus Speare ’s funeral home buried 104 people in August, most of them probable or confirmed cases of Ebola, and many of them friends of his. None of them ever secured a bed at Firestone. 
 
 “Firestone is only taking Firestone people,” complained Mr. Speare, who is also a district superintendent for the local Margibi county. “I don’t feel good about it.” 
 
 Firestone’s medical staff said they simply can’t extend themselves beyond the farm without putting themselves at risk. They have turned ambulances away. 
 
 Yet as caseloads rise, the company is reconsidering. A family of 16 recently showed up at the company’s hospital, all of them admitted or quarantined, Dr. Mabande recalled. 
 
 “We are surrounded by hot spots,” said Mr. Garcia, looking at a map. “And they’re crossing into our farm.” 
 
 Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com
– You know all the gnashing of teeth about how terrible the global response to the Ebola outbreak has been? Maybe someone should check with Firestone. As NPR reports, the tiremaker runs a rubber plantation and basically the entire town of Harbel, outside Monrovia, Liberia. And when an employee's wife turned up with the virus on March 30, Firestone Liberia's managing director says they "went into crisis mode": Upon discovering that there was nowhere to treat her, the company turned to the Internet for help in treating Ebola itself. Within a day, they had an Ebola ward. Within two, the woman was quarantined. They handed medical workers hazmat suits to prevent the virus' spread. "None of us had any Ebola experience," says the director, but NPR notes that they did have what everywhere else in the region did not: The muscle and resources that a major corporation can harness. The woman died, but not one of Firestone's roughly 8,500 employees and 71,500 family members contracted the virus. Months passed, and when the virus rampaged through the area in August, Firestone stepped up to the plate: It expanded the isolation ward, built an annex and quarantine centers, and sent out-of-work teachers (schools had been shut down) to go door-to-door and educate. Janitors were taught how to properly bury the dead, notes the Wall Street Journal. It runs its hospital ward with military-like precision, and at present it's down to just three patients, a trio of boys whose homes are outside the plantation. As for what's needed to contain the outbreak, a CDC rep says simply: "More Firestones." (Meanwhile, Spain is planning to kill an Ebola patient's dog, and the Dallas Ebola patient's bill is rising $1,000 per hour.)