In The Ruins, Angels Of Mercy
Without the barest necessities, doctors and nurses struggle to keep hurricane victims alive
Bonano was hoping the federal government would step in, but it was having its own problems. The Federal Emergency Management Agency set up a triage station at the New Orleans airport for patients, but doctors there soon found themselves swamped, with enough aircraft to ship out only children and the sickest patients. Some nursing home patients waited a day and a half for transport, sleeping on luggage carousels or behind rental-car counters. "We did not have food and water to give patients for 24 hours," says Mona Khanna, a physician and medical reporter from Dallas who is part of a FEMA Disaster Medical Assistance Team. "This morning [Thursday] they got Saltines and Cheez-Its. Just now they got bottled water."
Farther east in Mississippi, Garden Park Medical Center in Gulfport and the Biloxi Regional Medical Center got their ER s back up despite flooding and roof damage; FEMA had set up tents in the hospitals' parking lots to give tetanus shots and treat less serious cases. "We are the only building that is anywhere near functional in this part of Biloxi," says director of marketing Lori Derouen. The hospital in Bay St. Louis was closed. So was Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg, which transferred its intensive care patients to Wesley Medical Center across town. "We've got cars on the side of the interstate who have been trying to get to us for medical care, but they've run out of gas," says Ron Seal, CEO of Wesley. Those hospitals that remained open are in critical need of electric power and water, says Sam Cameron, CEO of the Mississippi Hospital Association. Gas for ambulances, and for employees to drive to work, was also running out. Still, Cameron says, "it's not nearly as bad as the folks in Louisiana."
Onslaught. Louisiana's Department of Health and Hospitals has had lots of practice with hurricanes over the years. As Katrina approached, public-health workers set up seven special-needs shelters at university arenas. But nothing had prepared them for the thousands of sick and injured who made their way north from the coast in cars, buses, helicopters, and ambulances, quickly filling the shelters. By midweek, the state had triaged more than 6,000 people, with thousands more coming. "Many of them are evacuees from hospitals," says Bob Johannessen, spokesman for DHH. "Many of them waited a very long time in the staging areas in New Orleans to get here. It's those existing medical conditions that are presenting the most challenges."
Survivors too ill to fend for themselves were ferried to hospitals and nursing homes hundreds of miles north by volunteer EMT s. By week's end, the state's hospitals were maxed out. "A lot of heart patients have been off their medications, and it's getting to a crisis situation with them," says Dave Miller, director of the emergency department at Summit Hospital in Baton Rouge. "We have a lobby right now full of people trying to get shelter. We've seen 'em, treated 'em, and discharged 'em, but they don't have anywhere to go."
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