Home > Through Hell and High Water > Archives > 2006 > May > 15 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USCHAPTER 10: RUMORS, RED TAPE AND DESPERATE CALLS FOR HELP
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Multimedia
New Orleans — The story spread rapidly through Charity Hospital, devastating those who were scrambling to save lives but running out of time: Gov. Kathleen Blanco had announced that Charity had already been evacuated.
One nurse began to cry. We’re going to die. We’re never going to get out of here.
Many news reports out of New Orleans the week that Hurricane Katrina hit were wrong or skewed. The governor had told CNN on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that Big Charity, without backup power, was “not functional at this time, and we are trying to evacuate the patients there.” Soon after, the television network reported that Charity was already “being evacuated.” By the time the statement reached those inside the hospital, it had falsely morphed into a done deal: Everyone was out.
Over and over, they had heard that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was on its way to rescue them. Now they felt truly forgotten. No one knew they were still there. No one would be coming.
Student nurse Susan Sanborn watched as a nurse snatched up her two young children and waded away from the hospital in chest-high water. Looking down from her fourth-floor window, Sanborn cried. She didn’t think they’d make it. How could the woman risk her children’s lives? How could she desert her job and patients?
Another nurse from Sanborn’s unit was relieved of her duties and threatened with being sent to the psychiatric ward.
The misinformation marked a turning point.
Doctors and nurses began calling CNN, Fox News and anyone they could reach to get the word out that they were still there. Miraculously, the WATS line in Sanborn’s unit still worked. By Wednesday, the nation was getting a firsthand account of the life-and-death crisis inside Charity.
Among those put on the air was Krystin Smith, a registered nurse who was caring for one of the hospital’s sickest patients, 23-year-old Hunter Reeves.
“Our patients are sitting in feces, and just — it’s awful,” Smith told Paula Zahn of CNN. “I mean, we are — and not only that, we are scared for ourselves too because it’s becoming a hazard to take care of the patients, because we are now getting sick… . That’s why we contacted you, because we thought that you all would get it out there that we’re suffering here, that we’re not doing too well, and not just our patients, but us too.”
As chief of trauma at Charity and director of trauma for the Tulane medical school, Dr. Norm McSwain had loyalties to both Charity and Tulane Hospital. He was in Tulane’s command post most of that week. But as time wore on, his concern grew for Charity; he worried it was being left behind.
McSwain, 68, saw how the Hospital Corporation of America was mobilizing to get everyone out of Tulane. Mel Lagarde, an HCA executive, refused to accept no from anyone. On the other side of the street, the Charity administrators weren’t nearly as aggressive, McSwain felt, in part because they had been told the government was on its way.
A nationally known trauma expert who trained at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, McSwain called a leader in the National Association of Emergency Medical Technicians. We’re having trouble getting through to anybody who will help us out, he told him. Can anybody get through to somebody in the White House?
Within minutes, an Associated Press reporter and a reporter with USA Today reached McSwain on his cellphone. He told both that if Charity didn’t get help soon, people would die.
“Somebody needs to come in a hurry,” McSwain told USA Today.
“By ‘in a hurry,’ I don’t mean tomorrow or the next day. They need to get here tonight. By tomorrow we’ll have dead patients simply because they were not evacuated.”
Don Smithburg, chief executive officer over all nine public hospitals in the Louisiana State University system, including Charity, also felt powerless. Since Saturday, he’d been stationed at the state command center in Baton Rouge. Now he watched as Michael Brown, head of FEMA at the time, held a news conference at the center, blaming state and local governments for their slow response.
Brown defended his agency, telling reporters it was taking so long to evacuate hospitals because medical staff needed time to get their patients ready. Smithburg knew that Charity’s patients had been ready since Tuesday morning when the basement flooded.
He had been buttonholing everyone at the state emergency operations center. He pleaded for help from representatives of FEMA, the National Guard, the Coast Guard and any other government official who would listen.
The governor was also at the state command post, and Smithburg spoke regularly to her. Conditions in Charity and its affiliate, University Hospital, were dire and deteriorating, he told her. She too asked federal officials for help.
But there was no clear chain of command, and Smithburg felt buried under bureaucratic red tape. Instead of walking across the room and saying what he needed, he had to sit at a computer and type up a cumbersome e-mail request, whether it was for security or to evacuate two entire hospitals.
Three times, he was told the government was on its way to Charity and University hospitals. Three times between Tuesday and Thursday, he radioed the information to the hospitals: FEMA is coming! The National Guard is coming! A National Guard truck did show up Wednesday night and took away some of Charity’s less critical patients. But there was no wholesale evacuation.
In the void, more and more employees began calling Smithburg after someone obtained his cellphone number. He knew it was unusual for employees to reach out to a CEO, but he had become their lifeline. Some nurses sobbed uncontrollably, and he tried to reassure them.
They didn’t think they were going to get out. As their leader, he felt helpless.
Employees told him they were starting to feed themselves intravenously.
TOMORROW: Dr. Ben deBoisblanc tries to save his four most critical patients — including Hunter Reeves and Preston Johnson. Chapter 11 of 22.
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Comments
By P. E. Adams
May 15, 2006 06:09 PM | Link to this
I don’t understand why Charity Hospital, as large as it was, did not have an evacuation plan. If they did have one who was in charge of it’s implementation? It seems the moral of this story is that relying on or waiting for the government, at any level, is going to be your worst choice. The private sector can be much more nimble and agressive in responding because…they just do it!
By Seth Simon
May 16, 2006 08:32 AM | Link to this
The philosophy has always been “shelter in place,” or “vertical evacuation.” They thought that the cost of evacuating all of the patients was prohibitive, that people would die needlessly enroute, that the huge pumps would take care of the city.
This wasn’t just the government. This was most of the hospitals and nursing homes in southeast Lousiana. Very few administrators wanted to deal with the hassles of evacuations or had the resources to pay for it.
By
May 16, 2006 08:38 AM | Link to this
Ok, yes I do believe that Charity should have had an evactuation plan, but lets stop and think even if they had a plan they still had no funding to implement the plan. Tulane was able to evacuate because they were a private hospital getting very private help. I understand that the two hospitals were public and private sectors but I honestly feel that the heads of both hopitals should have came together and not operated as two separate intities in that dire time of distress. After all of the critical patients were evacuated at Tulane I feel they should have then tried to atleast evacuate the critical patients at Charity seeing as the the two hospitals were literally right next door to each other maybe I’m missing something, but alot could have gone differently.
By V.J.Rob
May 16, 2006 09:04 AM | Link to this
I am proud to say that I work for HCA, they are awesome and truly came through for Tulane. I think that this should be a lesson for other hospitals in both the public and private sectors. Katrina not only affected LA and MS, it affected the entire country. We all still grieve for the lost lives and injustice that took place. Thank you for writing these articles and I cannot wait to read more.
By Robin
May 16, 2006 09:25 AM | Link to this
This is in response to the comment by PE Adams……….
One thing that everyone should keep in mind is that the private sector has money at their disposal that Charity Hospital did not have. That is one of the biggest differences between private Hospitals and public hospitals. Tulane had corporate resources they could call on for help. Charity did not.
By Carol Newey
May 16, 2006 09:51 AM | Link to this
I am a former (retired) HCA nurse and feel proud of the company and its organization. I can sympathize with all the nurses from both Charity and Tulane who were involved in the Katrina disaster. I remember how we hated all those disaster drills we participated in but hearing how well organized was the evacuation of Tulane makes it all worth while.
By CNewey
May 16, 2006 10:07 AM | Link to this
In reply to P.E.Adams comment: It may have been a case of everybody thought somebody else should do it and nobody did.
By Mitchel Haralson
May 16, 2006 11:41 AM | Link to this
Right-wing conservatives set out to destroy the big federal govrnment’s power and return it to the states. They succeeded! But when a big federal government effort was needed, in an emergency, then the weakened federal agencies that Bush and his cornies created were not up to the job. Now the right-wing nuts are blaming the victums for relying on the federal government which the conservatives had just downsized to the point that it was now basically useless.
By Gene
May 16, 2006 12:02 PM | Link to this
I was there that Fri when the last of us got off the roof; in fact, Theo and I along with John Holland were the last 3 on the garage waiting for patients from Charity hospital that never came. The last we heard before leaving was that they had been evacuated by boat and truck, but we didn’t even get that word until the roof had been stocked with thousands or pounds of food and water for Charity to use in their own evacuation. The word we had was that we were going to clear the roof and let Charity use it as their helipad since their own pad was flooded and they were going to leave us in place to help coordinate like we had done with Tulane. With no one to evacuate, they finally pulled us out.
By Gene
May 25, 2006 10:18 AM | Link to this
Correction, that was not John Holland with us at the end, that was his relief, a paramedic who took his place. We were never formally introduced. I was wondering after seeing a picture of Col Holland’s face and then reading that he was relieved after the last critical patient had left.