Deano Bonano is the deputy chief administrative officer for Jefferson Parish, La. Jefferson is the largest parish in the state, immediately west of New Orleans. U.S. News senior writer Amanda Spake spoke to Bonano last night about the pressing medical needs in his community. Here's a synopsis of the situation, in his own words:

"It's utter chaos here.

"In Jefferson Parish, three major hospitals remain open and are on backup power. It is horrible for them to deal with extremely sick people without running water. So much medical care is dependent on running water, but there isn't any. The parish, by that I mean us, the local government, is providing round-the-clock deliveries of fuel and water to the hospitals that are going to stay open.

"Of the 150,000 to 170,000 who stayed during the hurricane, many of those are special needs patients. These are patients in need of dialysis, oxygen-dependent patients, and those people were moved into these three hospitals before the hurricane hit. These hospitals generally have, maybe, 2,000 patients total. They now have something like 8,000 patients.

"People are lined up in hallways, everywhere we can plug in a machine. They will die without these special treatments. We're trying to relocate these special needs patients to hospitals outside the area, but transportation right now is hard or impossible. All of the regular buses and trucks are in use with refugees and trying to get people out of New Orleans. There is no transportation to move patients.

"Right now, we have about 1,000 people an hour coming into Jefferson Parish from New Orleans. We're attempting to contain those people to ship to other parts of the state. Initially, after they were rescued, they were just dumped here and left to roam around the parish for us to deal with. Now, we're trying to contain them until they can be bused out to other parts of the state to shelters.

"It's been three days, and we have yet to see any help from the federal government. We are feeding all the refugees. We are actually breaking into grocery stores to feed the masses. We're under martial law here, so we go out with police or National Guard members and we raid grocery stores to try to find food for people, but we are running out of supplies. I wish the federal government would get some food, water, and supplies in here.

"In terms of bacterial diseases, this is a problem, but we won't see that yet, it will take a little more time. In general, we have a serious mosquito problem here. We were in the middle of a West Nile epidemic prior to the storm, and we expect that to get far worse. We've also had cases this year of St. Louis encephalitis, which is a very serious mosquito-borne illness. We're going to begin spraying as soon as we can do it, because mosquitoes can be deadly here."

Find out more: Go to USNews.com for more information on Hurricane Katrina.