Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (19 page)

Someone suggested the day’s events had the makings of a good
television movie. Budo, dark-haired with a heart-shaped face and thick eyebrows, said she wanted Demi Moore to play her. Her longtime colleague on the night shift, Cheri Landry, short and stout, with hooded eyes, arched brows, and an air of wisdom, would be portrayed by Kathy Bates. Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Junior Seau—the star linebacker who was still alive at that time and playing for the Miami Dolphins—had roles as male ICU nurses: tough heroes who had carried patients up to the helipad in the heat.

Budo had her eighteen-year-old daughter with her. Their striped kitten, Honey, was in a kennel in the garage. Budo and her daughter went to sneak Honey upstairs in the dark. Animals were now forbidden to be in the hospital itself, but by this point Budo had worked the Saturday night shift before the storm, stayed awake packing on Sunday, and then spent more than two exhausting days on hurricane duty. She felt that she, her daughter, and their cat needed to be together. Honey was part of the family. As she climbed back upstairs to rejoin her colleagues, Budo turned and aimed her flashlight beam behind them. She would later write of having the sense that a menacing presence was following them.

IN THE COMMAND center, the few working cell phones kept ringing. The Coast Guard members held fast to the idea of continuing rescues overnight, particularly after learning about the seven LifeCare patients on ventilators, the rising water, and the possibility of a power cut within hours.
A doctor sent a security guard to wake Dr. Richard Deichmann and ask him what to tell a Coast Guard officer about sending more helicopters for the LifeCare patients. “Tell him to send them in the morning,” Deichmann said. As if we have any control, he thought. Deichmann considered it too dangerous to reopen the helipad. The staff needed rest.

Memorial incident commander Susan Mulderick discussed the matter with LifeCare incident commander Diane Robichaux. With all elevators now out of commission, Robichaux felt her staff would need extra hands to carry these most critical patients downstairs safely, but Mulderick said the men she could offer to help had gone to bed. Robichaux agreed to wait for daybreak. That would also allow time for LifeCare to send ambulances to pick up the patients and take them to other LifeCare hospitals, creating a smoother transition for the patients at a time when regional hospitals were jammed and, whether or not Robichaux thought of it, serving the interests of the company by keeping LifeCare patients within the LifeCare system.

FOR ICU NURSE manager Karen Wynn, the day’s reward was one small luxury, a trip to the doctors’ lounge down the hallway from the ICU to take a shower. There was just enough pressure to nudge a trickle of water out of the showerhead, water that had been declared contaminated and dangerous to drink. It felt fantastic.

“Mom! Mom!” The voice of Wynn’s teenage daughter interrupted the Calgon moment. “
There’s a guy out saying, ‘We need to move patients, we need to move patients.’ ” He was calling out for women and children.

“Wait a minute, nobody’s moving anywhere,” Wynn said. She felt responsible for the staff members she had called in to work. She felt responsible for their families, too. With most of the intensive care patients on the eighth floor gone, she wasn’t inclined to send her staff out to transport patients from other units. “Nobody on the eighth floor is moving anywhere,” she said. She quickly toweled off. “We’re not doing this willy-nilly, we need direction.” The one person she trusted to give that was Susan Mulderick. “I’m going to find Susan,” she said.

In other parts of the hospital, the sound of a man shouting stirred groggy adults and children from mattresses, sofas, and the odd examination table. “Everybody up! Everybody, get up!” The noise pierced the slumber of Dr. Ewing Cook, lying in his office with his wife and colleagues. They clicked on their flashlights and caught sight of a white man in fatigues yelling as he moved through the dimly lit respiratory care department at around one a.m.:
The boats are here! Get down there! You can take one bag! No animals! Go to the first floor! Boats are here and leaving in thirty minutes!

People screamed back at the man—how could he expect them to leave their pets behind? An Indian-born respiratory therapist and his wife had secreted a pair of golden retrievers in the hospital where they weren’t allowed. At home, the cossetted pets slept like children in their own room on individual recliner beds and were never permitted to trot outside without a quartet of boots placed over their paws. What was to become of them now?

Staff members scrambled to consolidate insurance certificates, needed medicines, important papers they had with them for safekeeping. Who had a single bag packed? They had brought enough to sustain themselves for days.

The Cooks and a group of other employees and family members tromped down the stairs by flashlight. They came to a halt at the sight of Susan Mulderick. She faced them, tall and authoritative, on a staircase landing. “What are y’all doing here?” she asked. They said they had been told to come downstairs. The boats that people had been expecting were ready to take them away. “What boats?” Mulderick asked. “There aren’t any boats.” Others told her they’d heard helicopters were waiting. Mulderick left to investigate.

The groups wound back upstairs to their mattresses in a sleepy fog. What little peace the night might have brought had been shattered. Word spread that some people couldn’t find belongings they had stowed
and left behind. Had the man stolen from them? Was it all a hoax built on their hopes of rescue?

The night was wasted. Now even the most exhausted found it impossible to sleep. After the futile jaunt downstairs, Ewing Cook felt a new level of anxiety, not good for his damaged heart. He lay awake in his office near the hospital’s engineering plant and listened to the roar of its diesel generators, the ticking of Memorial’s own weakening heart.

A BATTLE WAS under way to keep the generators running. Each of the three teal-colored generators was taller than a typical adult and pumped electricity into a complex circulatory system of feed lines, riser circuits, and transfer switches. Normally an outside company serviced the 750 kW generators, each producing the power of about six engines from one of the year’s most popular cars, a Toyota Camry. The hospital’s maintenance staff did little more than change the oil and run tests once a month in the middle of the night. The tests were brief, in keeping with national codes that treated hospital generators like heart-lung bypass machines used during surgeries, meant to support vital functions for a period of only minutes to hours. Despite the fact that the generators were not built for prolonged work, Memorial’s disaster plans called for them to shore up the hospital for at least three days. They had already been running for two.

None of the Memorial electricians or engineers on-site was a generator mechanic. Earlier, when one of the generator engines had shut down, casting part of the hospital into darkness and sending staff scrambling to move patients, maintenance workers concluded it was overheated. Laboring by flashlight, they added water to the radiator and were able to restart it.

Hours later, the problems multiplied. Low oil pressure appeared to be
the cause; the men brought barrels of diesel to try to prime the motors with fresh fuel and restart them. Maintenance men crossed the bridge to the surgery building to retrieve more diesel from a generator there. Some sections of the hospital were losing power. In parts where there was light, it seemed to be dimming, strangling.

Over the years, the original 1926 hospital had received additions, and the electrical system now resembled the blood supply of conjoined twins, separate but overlapping and, as a whole, unique to itself and mysterious.

One generator failed. Unable to restart it, the engineers tried to tie some of the lines it supplied to another generator. They pulled on rubber boots and ran down to the basement, splashing into knee-deep water, then climbed up a few steps to the mezzanine of the core electrical building.

They tried to determine the reason for the partial outages throughout the hospital. The depth of the water offered a clue. About a third of the automatic transfer switches, which allowed the generators to power the hospital when normal utility power was lost, were on a low level of the building, and it looked like they and their associated distribution panels might be submerged, much as plant operations director Eric Yancovich had predicted several months earlier.

Like in a scene from
The Poseidon Adventure
, the men waded through a narrow hallway bordered by electrical panels and a sign with two lightning bolts that read
CAUTION: HAZARDOUS VOLTAGE INSIDE
. Using a flashlight, they located a metal lever with a yellow rubber–coated handle above their heads marked “bypass handle.” Praying not to get electrocuted, one flipped it, grafting the load of the nonworking generator to a working one.

Soon a gauge showed that the working engine was drawing too much current, a sign of a short circuit. The men tried to back off and untie the two loads to avoid a fire, a terrifying possibility given that the sprinkler system’s pumps were now underwater and city fire trucks were presumably out of commission. To further adjust the load, they went around
the hospital shutting off scattered branch circuits serving unused fixtures and devices.

Another generator failed. This time, the workers had an idea of what caused the problem, but no spare parts to fix it. They tried to scavenge from the failed generator, but the attempted repair was unsuccessful.

The battle for the generators raged for two hours. At about two a.m. on Wednesday, August 31, 2005—nearly forty-eight hours after Katrina made landfall near New Orleans—the last backup generator surged and then died.

The sudden silence struck Dr. Ewing Cook, lying in his office on the second floor, trying to rest, as the sickest sound of his life.

ALARMS HERALDED the power loss. They flashed and wailed on the eighth floor, where the ICU nurses had settled for the night in the rooms of their rescued patients. Nurse manager Karen Wynn stepped up on a chair and
clobbered an alarm panel with her shoe to quiet it. She told her nurses to try to get some sleep.