Airport turned hospital: Escape from New Orleans
"Greetings from the New Orleans airport," writes emergency doctor Hemant Vankawala, who normally works at the Denton Regional Medical Center in Denton, Texas. He has seen the devastated population of New Orleans move past his eyes and through his caring hands this past week. And he has begun to tell his story–some of it quite raw– via E-mail to the American College of Emergency Physicians, which has shared them with U.S.News & World Report. This note, edited for clarity, is from September 7.
I am a member of the Texas-4 Disaster Medical Assistance Team. We are a part of FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency]. For the past eight days I have been living and working at the New Orleans airport, delivering medical care to the Katrina hurricane survivors.
Our team was the first to arrive at the airport and set up our field hospital. We watched our population grow from 30 personnel taking care of six patients and two security guards to around 10,000 patients in the first 15 hours. These people had had no food or water or security for several days and were tired, furstrated, sick, wet, and heartbroken. People were brought in by trucks, buses, ambulances, school buses, cars, and helicopters.
Overnight, we turned New Orleans airport into the busiest helicopter base in the world. At any given time there were at least eight to 10 helos offloading on the tarmac, filled with 10 to 40 survivors at a time, with 10 circling to land. It was a nonstop, never-ending process, a 24-hour-a-day operation. [TV] footage does not even begin to do it justice: the roar of rotor blades, the smell of jet fuel, and the thousands of eyes looking at us for answers, for hope. Our busiest day we offloaded just under 15,000 patients by air and ground. At that time we had about 30 medical providers and 100 ancillary staff. All we could do was provide the barest amount of comfort care. We watched many, many people die. We practiced medical triage at its most basic, black-tagging the sickest people and culling them from the masses so that they could die in a separate area. We were so short on wheelchairs and litters that we had to stack patients in airport chairs and lay them on the floor. They remained there for hours, too tired to be frightened, too weak to be care about their urine- and stool-soaked clothing, too desperate to even ask what was going to happen next.
There was nothing sexy or glamorous or routine about what we did. We moved hundreds of patients an hour, thousands of patients a day off the flight line and into the terminal and baggage area. Patients were loaded onto baggage carts and trucked to the baggage area, like, well, baggage. And there was no time to talk, no time to cry, no time to think, because they kept on coming.
Imagine having no beds, no oxygen, no nothing except some nitro, aspirin, and all the good intentions in the world. We did everything from delivering babies to simply providing morphine and a blanket to septic and critical patients and allowing them to die.
During the days that it took for that exodus to occur, we filled the airport to its bursting point. There was a time when there were 16,000 angry, tired, frustrated people here. There were stabbing and rape victims–and people on the verge of mobbing. The flight line, lined with two parallel rows of Dauphins, Sea Kings, Hueys, Chinooks, and every other kind of helicopter imaginable, was a dangerous place. But we were much more frightened whenever we entered the sea of displaced humanity that had filled every nook and cranny of the airport.
Only now that the thousands of survivors have been evacuated and the floors soaked in bleach, the putrid air allowed to exchange for fresh, the number of soldiers allowed to outnumber the patients, do we feel safe. I have met so many people while down here–people who were at ground zero at 9/11, people who have done tsunami relief, tours in Iraq, and every one of them has said this is the worst thing they have ever seen.
For those of you who want to help, the next step is to help those who arrive in your local area. The only real medical care these survivors will receive is once they land in safe, clean areas far from here. Many of the sickest simply died while here at the airport; many have been stressed beyond measure and will die shortly even though they were evacuated. If you are not medical, then go the shelters, hold hands, give hugs and prayers.
Talk to these survivors; hear their stories and what they have been through; look into their eyes. You will never think of America the same way.