Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital (4 page)

“Can we do this?” he would later remember asking her. “Do we really have to do this?”

CHAPTER
1

FOR CERTAIN NEW ORLEANIANS, Memorial Medical Center was the place you went to ride out each hurricane that the loop current of the Gulf of Mexico launched like a pinball at the city. But chances are you wouldn’t call it Memorial Medical Center. You’d call it “Baptist,” its nickname since it had existed as Southern Baptist Hospital. Working a hurricane at
317-bed Baptist meant bringing along kids, parents and grandparents, dogs, cats and rabbits, and coolers and grocery bags packed with party chips, cheese dip, and muffulettas. You’d probably show up even if you weren’t on duty. If you were a doctor and had outpatients who were unwell, you might check them in too, believing Baptist a safer refuge than their homes. Then you’d settle down on a cot or an air mattress, and the hurricane, which always seemed to hit at night, would rage against the hospital and leave. The next day, the sun would rise and you would help clean up the debris and go home.

For nearly eighty years the steel and concrete hospital, armored in reddish-brown tapestry brick blazoned with gray stone and towering over the neighborhood near Claiborne and Napoleon Avenues, had defended those inside it against every capricious punch the Gulf’s weather systems had thrown. In 1965, it “took the century’s worst storm in stride,” weathering Hurricane Betsy “like a sturdy ship” and protecting
more than one thousand people who sheltered inside, its administrator bragged in the hospital newsletter. A year before Katrina, when “[Hurricane] Ivan knocked, Memorial stood ready.” As Cathy Green, a nurse in the surgical intensive care unit, told her worried adult daughter when Katrina threatened: “If I’m in trouble at Baptist Hospital, if Baptist Hospital fails, it means the entire city would be destroyed.”

Utter faith in the hospital traced back to its founding: “I have an optimism that is almost explosive,” the president of the Southern Baptist Hospital Commission board of directors
wrote in a letter to the hospital’s superintendent in February 1926, less than a month before a simple luncheon in the basement cafeteria and a dedication in the chapel marked the hospital’s opening. “In my humble opinion we have begun at New Orleans what is destined to be the greatest hospital in all the Southland.”

The property of the $2 million hospital stretched for two city blocks. Breathless news of its opening, with accompanying ads, occupied nearly three full pages of the Sunday, March 14, 1926,
New Orleans Item-Tribune
. The newspaper profiled the superintendent of the “magnificent” hospital, fifty-year-old Dr. Louis J. Bristow, and filled several column inches with a list of more than fifty of the items Bristow had carefully selected for it, from electrocardiographs to potato peelers. The hospital, its potential patrons learned, had the appearance of a modern hotel or private home, providing a “general atmosphere of cheerfulness” found wanting in New Orleans’s older hospitals. Nearly an entire page was given over to a tour that described such minute details as the lighting system that produced “ample illumination without glare,” the steam-heated blanket warmers on each floor, and the “dainty electric reading lamp” perched on each bedside table gracing the hospital’s private bedrooms. “Ice is frozen in cubes on each floor in sufficient quantities to supply all patients,” one article trilled. The stories, which read more like press releases or ad copy than news, may well have been penned by superintendent Bristow himself, or perhaps his daughter, Gwen, a writer. “The new institution
stands unsurpassed among the hospitals of the south in point of modern conveniences.”

The age of electrical invention afforded a comfortable convalescence as doctors applied new technologies to their increasingly science-based practices. Suppliers of newfangled appliances filled the
Item-Tribune
with advertisements celebrating their affiliation with Southern Baptist. The Acme X-Ray Sales Co. had equipped the hospital with a Precision Type Coronaless Roentgen Apparatus, “internationally recognized as the foremost X-Ray machine.” Barnes Electric Construction Co., Ltd., of Gravier Street, which had laid the hospital’s electrical and phone wiring, had also installed a call system incorporating musical gongs and silent luminescent indicators. All operating rooms had been equipped with compressed air and vacuum attachments. The hospital’s design included “ventilation methods productive of coolness in the summer” to shield patients from the Southern heat.

New Orleans Public Service Inc., NOPSI, a newly consolidated utility company, purchased a nearly full-page advertisement announcing it had installed Frigidaire electric refrigerators on every floor of Baptist. “If the hospital MUST have the protection of FRIGIDAIRE, surely the home, the store and the restaurant SHOULD have it.” To a city where many homes still had iceboxes, the refrigerators’ low, even temperatures were described as a form of health insurance, preventing food spoilage and “the incipient development of germ life.”

Baptist had its own power plant. A smokestack rose seven stories above it. Workers prepared to feed the hospital’s furnaces 20,000 gallons of oil per week.

Seven years earlier, city missionary Clementine Morgan Kelly had stood before congregants at a church meeting and announced the conclusion she had reached after years of “prayerful study, deep thinking, hard labor,” and visits to medical charity wards. “
The crying need of the hour is a Baptist hospital for New Orleans,” she said. “We shall never convince
New Orleans of the seriousness of our purpose to give this city Christ’s pure gospel, until we do missionary work through a Baptist hospital.” Baptists could open people’s hearts to Christ by engaging, as Christ did, in healing.

The Southern Baptist press spread Kelly’s idea to a receptive church already engaged in a hospital-building movement. New Orleanians of other religions supported the idea too. Almost eight hundred city dwellers donated money to purchase land for the new hospital.

The Saturday afternoon of the hospital’s dedication, superintendent Bristow, the champion who had brought Clementine Morgan Kelly’s dream to fruition, rose to speak. “The purpose of the Southern Baptist Hospital, in a single phrase, is to glorify God,” he said. Poor charity patients would have their own rooms like the wealthy instead of being placed in the ghettos of separate wards. “We do not wish to capitalize the sufferings of human beings, but to relieve them.” The hospital opened its doors to serve its stated, three-pronged mission: the alleviation of pain, the prolongation of life, and the relief of suffering.

The operation was not boundlessly munificent. To receive charity care, a poor family had to supply a letter from a church that testified to the family’s need and promised the hospital a donation. “We cannot undertake to help those whose own church declines aid,” Bristow wrote. The definition of charity cases was narrow at first, limited mainly to widows, orphans, and the elderly. A poor man whose wife required treatment would be given credit and a lecture about how charity would steal his dignity. Bristow often used the stories of charity patients, especially children, to fill pamphlets soliciting donations for Southern Baptist. He highlighted the important missionary work Southern Baptist Hospital was performing as it won converts and raised the profile of “white Baptists” in New Orleans, who were a minority in the city’s twenty-eight Baptist churches and whose Convention had a history of support for slavery, Jim Crow laws, and racial segregation.

The new hospital sat in one of the lower parts of a city that dipped
below sea level like a basement below the water table. Runoff had to be caught, channeled, and pumped skyward to expel it into surrounding lakes.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, $15.3 million had been spent on drains, canals, and pumps to help transform the soggy, typhoid- and malaria-ridden basin between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain into a modern city. Since then, rapid development had paved over ground that had once absorbed rainfall, but when the hospital opened, the city hadn’t increased its pumping capacity in a decade.

The 11,700 densely populated acres in the uptown drainage section of the city that encircled Baptist were served by a single pumping station that lifted the water into a relief canal that channeled it to another pumping station, which raised the water high enough to flow into Lake Pontchartrain. An upgrade in the area’s pumping and canaling capacity had been envisioned to go along with the development, but while buildings went up, the work below ground lay undone. With no storms of great magnitude, the improvements had not been prioritized.

SUNDAY, MAY 2, 1926

THE UNSEASONABLY HOT weather was subsiding, and that pleasant afternoon some families set out for Heinemann Park to cheer for the New Orleans Pelicans batters as they took on Little Rock. Others laid out the suits, dresses, and hats they planned to wear to a show at one of the downtown theaters along Canal Street. Many thousands were expected to ride the streetcar to New Orleans’s giant public playground, City Park, for its annual opening fete. Sport exhibitions, musical performances, vaudeville acts, and movies packed the schedule. In the evening, festivalgoers would be invited within the Ionic columns of an open-air peristylium and dance for hours to the beat of the Hotsy Totsy Jazz Band. Above them, a grand exhibition of fireworks would
paint the heavens with Chinese Spiders, Silver Comets, Turkish Crosses, Caskets of Jewels, Revolving Wheels, Large Waterfalls, and a bouquet of a hundred skyrockets.

Storm clouds began assailing the city just after three p.m. Uptown, where Southern Baptist Hospital had been open less than two months, raindrops knocked against the steep sides of tarred roofs and slapped onto newly laid pavement, gathering in rivulets that quickly joined streams. Thunder rattled windows. The temperature dropped nearly twenty degrees. During the first four hours of the storm, a gauge recorded a rainfall of nearly six inches, a record-setting pace. Debris-clogged catch basins blocked water from entering drainage canals. Streams in the streets grew to torrents. “It looked,” Realtor Harry Latter observed as he tried to get home, “as if the river had broken in New Orleans.”

A train crashed into a car in the blinding rain, killing two people. Thousands of creosoted wooden paving blocks swelled, buckled roadways, broke free, and floated away. Cars stalled as water seeped under their radiators and drenched wires. Lifeless autos blocked streetcar tracks. Work crews braved the storm to encircle them with cables and tow them. Streetcar lines shut down, leaving people stranded beneath the clattering rooftops of homes, churches, and public places.

At City Park, the sudden deluge brought baseball, tennis, and golf games to a halt and drove crowds of people into a bandstand for shelter. A musician took the stage to entertain them, but the storm only grew more intense and the festival had to be postponed.

Lightning danced across the darkening sky above the peristylium in place of May fete fireworks. At around eight p.m., a bolt struck near the Telephone Exchange Building, throwing around 1,300 lines out of commission. Water backed up into the tubes that surrounded intercity telegraph wires as they ran through flooded manholes.

On the grounds of Southern Baptist Hospital, thigh-level water smothered the new gardens. Even high-riding cars parked nearby on
Napoleon and Magnolia Streets were bathed to within several inches of their seats.

Inside, water poured into the basement, quickly rising to a height suitable for baptismal immersion. Medical records, groceries, drugs, instruments, linen, and the hospital’s main stove and dining room tables were submerged. Louis Bristow and other doctors waded into water filled with floating chairs. They reached for airtight containers and handed them up to be sorted by nurses.

The lights stayed on, but the elevators stopped working. About a hundred visitors and nonstaff nurses were also stranded at Baptist for the night. They picked up phone receivers and tried to dial loved ones but couldn’t make a connection.

Firemen were called to tap the hospital’s basement with their pumping engines. At five thirty the next morning, they were finally able to draw floodwater into the storm sewers faster than the basement was refilling. Employees and student nurses gathered in the small diet kitchens on each floor and filled patient trays with improvised meals, presumably from the Frigidaires. NOPSI, which also operated the city’s stalled streetcar lines, came quickly to Baptist to replace its gas-powered kitchen.

Hundreds of unprotected cases of drugs and supplies had been destroyed. Of all the city’s businesses, the new hospital was thought to have sustained the greatest losses,
with initial estimates ranging from $40,000 to $60,000 in damage (
between $525,000 and $800,000 in 2013 dollars).

Superintendent Louis Bristow sought to reassure the public. He told the
New Orleans Item
that each floor of the hospital had enough drugs and supplies to run normally for several weeks or until replacement supplies could be bought. “We are operating as usual,” he said. “There was no suffering to any of the patients. Our staff met the emergency in splendid fashion.”