Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (22 page)

LIFECARE NURSING DIRECTOR Gina Isbell and nurse executive Therese Mendez left the cool peace of Isbell’s car to return to work on the seventh floor. Isbell carried with her the medical chart of the patient who had died in her hands, John Russell. She gave the chart to a young, dark-haired doctor whom she had seen frequently on the LifeCare floor, Dr. Roy Culotta, the one who had brought his grandmother to the hospital for safety during the storm and entrusted her to the LifeCare nurses. Culotta was a pulmonary physician at the hospital who had inherited Ewing Cook’s patients when Cook retired from clinical practice earlier in the year. Isbell told Culotta that Russell had died on the second floor and had been moved to the chapel.

Although it was still early in the morning, by the time Isbell returned to the floor, workers had helped many of the LifeCare patients into wheelchairs and wheeled them toward the stairwells. Boats were expected to arrive and ferry patients to dry ground. The patients would be staged on the ambulance ramp outside the emergency room to await them. Isbell, though she hadn’t slept overnight, went back downstairs at around nine thirty a.m. to oversee their care.

AN AMPED-UP, motorized roar drew dozens of Memorial’s inmates to the hospital windows. Cheers, applause, and shouts erupted from the crowds massed atop the flooded ambulance ramp on Clara Street. Deliverance!

“Thank God!” someone yelled in the direction of two flat-bottomed airboats wafting up to the hospital on propellers nearly the size of Ferris wheels. “How did y’all know we were here?” How in the hell would we
not
know you’re here? Sandra LeBlanc, in one of the airboats, wondered. The hospital had guarded the corner of Napoleon and Clara streets for seventy-nine years.

LeBlanc, whose bright-yellow Louisiana State University baseball cap stood out on the metallic airboat, was a paramedic and the coordinator of the Emergency Medical Technology program at Elaine P. Nunez Community College in nearby Chalmette. The journey she and her husband had taken to Memorial, despite knowing its location well, qualified as an odyssey. It had begun a full day earlier, on Tuesday, with news that the city had flooded. Mark and Sandra loaded up their six-cylinder Chevy Silverado and left a relative’s house in northern Louisiana, where they had sheltered from the storm after evacuating from New Orleans. Their goal was to rescue Mark’s mother, LifeCare patient Vera LeBlanc, and her sitter. That meant finding a way to get into the city. They drove first to check in at the state’s Bureau of Emergency Medical Services in the capital, Baton Rouge, to pick up volunteer identification badges. The offices, rented from the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries, faced a vast parking lot filled with ambulances and medics who seemed to be awaiting direction. New Orleans was about seventy-five miles to the southeast.

Sandra had a loose connection with government by virtue of having once administered state EMT exams. At the EMS registration desk, she wrote her name on a piece of paper and the name of her next of kin. That officials were requesting this detail scared her. “Where are you going?” a
worker asked. “Where are you sending us?” Sandra replied. The worker told her there was a triage center on a freeway interchange just west of New Orleans. Sandra said they would go there.

The bureau had run out of ID badges, and Sandra had mistakenly left her credentials behind before Katrina. Concerned about possible checkpoints, Sandra and Mark drove their Chevy to a fire station about forty miles from New Orleans, hoping to tag along with rescue crews. The LeBlancs found dozens of firefighters there, but then waited all day for them to be sent toward the city to replace tiring crews. The call never came. Finally, close to evening, a few frustrated firefighters and their chief decided to drive to the triage point. The LeBlancs joined them, and the group was waved through toward the city.

They reached the cloverleaf highway interchange west of New Orleans at Causeway Boulevard. Thousands of people came into sight, sitting, standing, and lying on land bristling with debris and light poles, downed to facilitate helicopter landings. To Sandra it looked like a war zone, unfathomable. They stopped and watched helicopters descend and pour more people onto the grass.

The SARBOO, search-and-rescue base of operations, allowed pilots to make quick loops in and out of the flood zone. Officials had managed to execute only half of the concept described in the Hurricane Pam exercises, however, as they had failed to provide the 600 buses and 1,200 drivers needed to pick up the people being dropped there.

Sandra searched for other medical personnel and found the leader of an ambulance company shouting into his cell phone. “I don’t give a shit!” he said. “I need bathrooms, I need food, I need water, I need it now! I need buses, I need cots …” Sandra saw a few of her former EMT students. They looked exhausted, and she joined them in helping to sort patients. Sandra examined injured people, sick people, diabetics missing limbs. She directed some of them to ambulances heading to Baton Rouge.

For the vast majority of people camped on the freeway interchange,
she could do nothing. Many, Sandra learned, had experienced a terrifying day and night on their rooftops and urgently needed shelter, food, and water. When one approached with a polite request, “Please give me a bottle for my mom over there,” Sandra said no. The medical teams had hidden their own food and water in supply trailers for fear of being overrun. “If I give you a bottle, then I have to give everybody a bottle, and then we won’t have water to take care of you people,” Sandra told the petitioner. She felt horrible. It was crazy. Why wasn’t there water for the people?

As she worked, Sandra combed the crowds for someone who could tell her about rescue plans for the city’s hospitals. Early that afternoon, officials had called on the radio for anyone who had a boat to bring it to a nearby Sam’s Club in a suburb of New Orleans. “
We desperately need these boats, we’ve got deputies that need to be rescued,” Aaron Broussard, the president of neighboring Jefferson Parish, had told a radio host. Hospitals, too, could be evacuated by water. But as evening fell and light drained away from the disaster zone, Sandra LeBlanc saw boats lined up on the interstate, on trailers.

While Sandra worked on Tuesday evening, five hundred miles away, in Dallas, Tenet’s regional business director, Michael Arvin, phoned the EMS bureau in Baton Rouge and left a message for its director. He reported that floodwater was rising quickly around Memorial and another of the company’s hospitals, Lindy Boggs Medical Center. One of the hospitals had lost electricity, he said, and he asked the state for help. Within an hour, at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, a worker had noted in the state EMS logs that the two hospitals would become a high priority to evacuate: “Mission 1.”

Twenty minutes later the EMS bureau dispatched a volunteer, Carl Cramer, from Baton Rouge toward New Orleans. His mission was to meet up with fifty-five boats and evacuate the two hospitals. He checked in with the bureau after midnight on Wednesday morning, and his update was dutifully recorded in the logs in Baton Rouge. “Never did hook
up with the boats. Was told they stopped the boats because of snipers and darkness.” Instead, Cramer joined the other EMS workers at the cloverleaf on Causeway Boulevard.

When Vera LeBlanc’s sitter called Sandra LeBlanc in the middle of the night from Memorial, Sandra carried the phone out of the trailer and saw Cramer. She knew him from his work with the state’s EMS program. “Can you get the command center on the radio?” she asked. If EMS officials could hear the sitter’s desperation, she thought, they might focus harder on rescuing people at the hospital. Sandra’s plea was recorded in the EMS logs at 4:45 a.m. on Wednesday: “Frantic call from her mother in law—the nurses are starting to panic—they are in Memorial Hospital on Napoleon.”

LeBlanc was told, inexplicably, that the hospital was now considered
second
priority. Its best hope of rescue, it seemed, lay with her, an EMT teacher who wasn’t even on contract with the state anymore. The person on the other side of the radio said Sandra should go with the boats at sunrise, find the best place to launch them, and do what she could to help empty the hospital.

At daylight on Wednesday, the LeBlancs drove six miles south on Causeway Boulevard to the Sam’s Club parking lot near where the floodwaters started. The lot was filled with people and boats. The LeBlancs struck up a conversation with two men. The
blunted vowels and head-spinning pace of their patois marked them as Louisiana Cajuns, descendants of the French via Nova Scotia and centuries-long residents of southern Acadiana, a land of marshes and languid bayous that tilted along the Gulf Coast and was best traversed by boat.

“We’re here to rescue people out of the hospitals. That’s what we’re going to do,” one said. Each man had an airboat and was looking for someone to tell him where to go. The LeBlancs told them about Mark’s mother and the horrible conditions the sitter had described at Memorial. The men said they thought Memorial might be one of the hospitals
where volunteers would be sent. One of them went to look for information. He returned and said, “They’re fixing to make an announcement.”

The boat pilots in the parking lot gathered around a woman who climbed up on a tailgate to speak to them. She announced that she needed volunteers to scout out routes to an initial set of destinations. She shouted out the names of several hospitals—other hospitals, not Memorial.

When the woman finished, the LeBlancs raised their hands and asked, what about Memorial, what about Baptist? The woman said it was being prioritized
last
among the hospitals. Why, she didn’t know.

The LeBlancs couldn’t understand it. Didn’t officials realize that Memorial had lost power and that people there were panicking, getting desperate, even dying? Were the other hospitals in New Orleans somehow worse off? Who was in charge? Where were the answers?

One of the two Cajun men asked the LeBlancs if they knew how to get to the hospital. “Well, sure,” Mark said. He had been born there when it was known as Baptist. It was the hospital where his family always went for care. He had visited his mother there just the other day. The two men said they would pilot their airboats to Memorial if the LeBlancs could show them the way.

“We don’t need much water to launch,” one of the airboat captains said. They piled into pickup trucks and explored one potential route to the flood zone, then looped back and hit water on Jefferson Highway just east of Ochsner Medical Center, near a set of railroad tracks and the Orleans Parish line. The LeBlancs explained that from there it was a straight shot to Memorial along the highway, which turned into Claiborne Avenue. It was the route, in reverse, that the LeBlancs had used to evacuate the city days earlier. The men backed their trailers into the water and launched the boats from there.

The giant fans at the back of the boats stirred the air with a roar and propelled them. As they floated over the highway, Mark LeBlanc imagined cars, from clunkers to the fanciest Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes,
parked in the medians, now drowned. The deeper they ventured into the city, the more intense and frantic the scene. They saw people wading through water up to their necks who turned to look and gesture at the airboats loudening the midmorning. The LeBlancs had only advice to dispense. “There’s dry land that way! We can’t stop. We’re on our way to the hospital.”

Two small aluminum boats joined them as they went. When they arrived at Memorial, Mark borrowed a flashlight from a nurse and bounded up seven flights of stairs to LifeCare. What hit him first was the heat, then the stillness. Nursing assistants loitered at a desk, looking worn, not tending to patients. Some of them registered shock when they saw him, knowing he had not stayed at Memorial for the storm. The patients he passed were almost naked. He found his eighty-two-year-old mother covered in sweat, lying on a wet bed. She greeted him with a smile and told him she was thirsty. She was, she said calmly, “in a mess.”

The sight infuriated Mark, and he left to get Sandra. They comforted his mother and then went to find out what the hell was happening. Diane Robichaux, the visibly pregnant senior leader on the floor, met with them in her office and said she didn’t have much information. The LeBlancs told her they had brought airboats to Memorial and planned to round up more. They explained the location of the launch site where patients could be dropped. “You’re going to have to have ambulances to pick them up there,” Sandra said.