Katrina: Memorial Hospital Patient Deaths

Like the poster above, I'm also not political. But the Bush administration’s lack of concern in not allocating resources to evacuate the poor (those with no transportation) IN ADVANCE was wrong. I was working in a downtown N.O. University Hospital and we ALL KNEW in advance that Katrina would be a massive category 5. We evacuated as many patients as we could but if buses had been sent we could have gotten more moved out of the area. Private Citizens who drove buses down to help were turned away by the feds.

The incompetence, extreme disorganization and feeling of abandonment became much more apparent after the storm. While we were trying to get pts evacuated helicopters weren't bringing us extra medical personnel, they were bringing us more patients they had rescued from houses. In my opinion, Bush was more concerned with finishing his father's failed battle in Iraq.-Finding Sadam and WMD's. (Bush was touring Iraq before, during and for a day AFTER the storm hit.) We knew at least a day ahead of time that this would be a storm like nobody had ever seen. Why didn't the Bush admin know? Again, in my personal opinion, they didn't care because the people who didn't have the means to evacuate were mostly the poor.

I remember a few times seeing news footage of third world countries or countries ravaged by barbaric wars....Sometimes there would be a shot of a dead body just lying on the street while people were going about their business, practically stepping over the poor soul. I remember thinking, just how chaotic; HOW BAD do things have to be in your country that people could ACTUALLY ignore a dead body on a public street!

After 4 days in the hospital without power and not enough supplies, we were allowed to go home. I had to walk 6 blocks to a parking garage where I'd left my car. The whole seen downtown was unreal. As I turned on to Canal Street I saw a black woman in a wheelchair. She had died apparently was abandoned there without a sheet to cover her. She was holding a cardboard sign with her name on it. I thought maybe her family did that so someone would be able to identify her and they could bury her if they survived Katrina's aftermath. It was like the news reels I'd seen of third world countries, people were walking past her body ignoring her. It felt like we weren’t in America.



I hope we learned something so that we are more organized and prepared for the next disaster that hits our country.

This is a really interesting thread. Thanks for all the posts on this subject.

You're incorrect - Katrina made landfall as a Category THREE, not a five, with maximum sustained winds of 125 miles an hour. She made landfall first in Florida as a tropical storm, then reintensified over the warm watered Loop Current in the Gulf, hit Cat 5 status again for a brief period, then slammed into the Gulf Coast of Louisiana as a Cat 3 (some do say a four, but that seems to be based more on the speed of recorded gusts at landfall and not on sustained power), jumped the sound as she weakened and backtracked slightly, and then made a third landfall at Cat three intensity with winds of 117 mph sustained on the MS/LA border. She then weakened further, bounced across and up the central US and caused flash flooding and all sorts of tornadoes on her way, before finally dying as an extratropical system somewhere between the Great Lakes and Canada.

In the Saffir-Simpson scale, a Cat five has sustained winds of 155 mph or greater.

Only THREE Cat 5s have ever hit the US: Andrew in 1992, Camille in 1969, and the so-called Labor Day hurricane of 1935 in the Florida Keys. There is speculation on the Galveston hurricane of 1900, but it is believed that storm was actually a Cat 4, with its winds estimated at 134 mph.

Katrina did not make landfall as a Cat 5 (and thank God she didn't - if she had, rebuilding New Orleans would be moot because New Orleans would now be UNDER the Gulf of Mexico). Of the known storms to ever hit Cat 5 status (there have been something like 23 since records have been kept) only eight have ever hit land as Cat 5s, and only three of them have been in the US.

Hurricane Camille was the strongest storm EVER to hit the US mainland; she roared into the Gulf Coast of Mississippi with an unprecedented - and since unrepeated - 200 mph+ wind gusts, with sustained winds in excess of 180 to 190 mph. Katrina KILLED more d/t flooding, but Camille was more powerful (and feel free to look that up: http://www.geocities.com/hurricanene...anecamille.htm - I checked my facts first). IMMEDIATELY after Camille Nixon sent in the National Guard and martial law was declared.

So in comparison, Bush didn't do a darned thing.

I'm a huge hurricane buff/weather freak. Weird, yes, but the power of nature fascinates me.

Note - Katrina isn't even the deadliest. That dubious honor goes to the 1900 Galveston storm. Officially, records record six thousand dead, but it is believed that that number is grossly inaccurate and may be closer to an unreal TWELVE thousand. Katrina is the third deadliest with 1800 dead recorded, and there was one I believe in 1928 in Okechobee, FL that killed about 6000 that is generally given second place (dis)honors.

New Orleans is just a huge bowl that Katrina basically filled with water - its center is below sea level and its edges are only something like twenty feet above sea level. So when the levies failed, New Orleans filled - and the water had no place to go.

Back to the thread, and I am sorry about the hijack.

Holy crap. I knew it was bad beforehand, but that's ridiculous.

I have always believed that the delay in getting aid to the Superdome, Convention Center, and New Orleans in general was a deliberate effort to kill off a maximum number of poor black people.

Volunteers from UNC - are you referring to the three young men from Duke University who loaded up an SUV belonging to one of their dads with bottled water, diapers, feminine hygiene products, etc. and drove overnight right on up to the Superdome, and wanted no special accolades for doing this? I'll never forget that story.

When word got out that they were going to the Superdome, their classmates were literally standing in line to give them things (hence the Kotex) and one of them had a sibling with a new baby and that's where they got the idea for the diapers.

Those courageous young men were among the REAL heroes of Hurricane Katrina.

Wow that would be malicious. Can't say I ever thought that. IMO it's just MUCH easier to ignore people who don't have power, money, prestige or are a minority group in our society. Personally I think that’s why the Regan administration put mega bucks of funding into cancer research while spending very little on AIDS, a plague killing many in the (minority group) gay community.

I think that’s also why nurses always get the short shaft compared to doctors. It’s also why nurses get abused or taken advantage of at work, more than almost ALL other professions! Nurses are a mostly women, women are still less powerful and are considered a ‘minority’. Sad that in our society in the year 2009 women STILL have much less power and political clout than men.

I remember the young men from Duke, I think they also transported some sick people from the Superdome to a hospital that would take them.

Slate.com has coverage here

http://www.alternet.org/rss/breaking...follow-up_too/

the first page has a schematic diagram of the hospital, which shows where the patients were--looks like it will be informative.