Hospital evacuations chaotic, some deadly

KENNER, La. — Some were being given water by soldiers. Some had small spasms as they lay on their stretchers. Some psychiatric patients chewed their lower lips or babbled quietly. Some tried to wander out the doors where buses dropped off more patients. Some were dying; one corpse in a wheelchair, not far from the Delta counter, lay covered by a blue blanket.

On the day that a fleet of military helicopters and buses with military escorts finally succeeded in emptying the exhausted and darkened hospitals in the city's flooded zones, the departures concourse of the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport had become the newest and most chaotic hospital in the New Orleans area.

By evening, all the patients in the flooded zone had been moved out, though hundreds of medical personnel and frightened city residents who had sought shelter in hospitals from rising water were still hoping someone would come get them, too. Left behind were an unknown number lying dead in flooded morgues and sometimes in spare corridors.

As the nation watched long lines of obviously fragile patients wheeled down the tarmac, it was clear that some patients had died in transit — the airport hospital had its own morgue — and there were worrying hints that the forgotten nursing homes of New Orleans might ultimately be found to be worse charnel houses than the stranded hospitals.

With hundreds of National Guard troops spreading out in the city streets, it was finally easier for small boats to approach embattled hospitals, some of which were surrounded by 6 feet of floodwater and had little or no electricity and no running water. At the same time, the fleet of helicopters evacuating patients from rooftops had grown from a handful of single-patient civilian ambulances just after the storm to about 100 military medevac choppers.

The evacuations came in the nick of time for several hospitals where doctors had been working by flashlight and helping patients breathe with manual ventilators, waiting helplessly for news from the outside without being able to turn on a TV set or make a phone call.