Baton Rouge, La.
For nearly five days after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, knocking out power, fresh water, and communications to three teaching hospitals in downtown New Orleans, doctors and medical residents at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center struggled to keep patients alive. A few doctors even fed each other intravenously in order to save what little nourishment they had for their patients.
In an adjacent medical-education building, 160 students and faculty and staff members also waited five days as panicked storm victims banged on the doors and snipers took aim at doctors trying to evacuate their patients. When rescue finally came, late Friday, medical-school administrators performed the grim task of euthanizing laboratory animals that had not already drowned in the fetid, gasoline-laced floodwaters.
Larry H. Hollier, dean of the LSU School of Medicine, looked shellshocked on Saturday as he recounted the struggle to rescue his staff and students as day after day went by and no help arrived. “They weren’t the top priority,” Dr. Hollier said. “The people on the rooftops were the top priority.”
Dr. Hollier spoke while taking a break from the “war room” at LSU’s system office here, where he was working with colleagues around the clock to keep the medical school in operation. The school is scheduled to restart classes for first- and second-year students on September 26 at an LSU medical-research building here. It is also scrambling to find hospitals and other clinical sites for its third- and fourth-year students.
As the medical school strives to get back on its feet, images of those final days in New Orleans after the hurricane hit were fresh in Dr. Hollier’s mind.
“We had residents and faculty who were saving what little food and water they had for the patients,” Dr. Hollier said. “They had to use IV’s on some of the doctors because they were so dehydrated.”
He choked up as he told of faculty members who had remained stranded in their apartments in the French Quarter and of colleagues who had tried to rescue them by boat, some carrying guns for protection. “It’s not over,” he said, his voice shaking. “But everyone is eager to get back to work. We have to, for our patients and our students.”
LSU’s two main teaching hospitals in New Orleans -- Charity Hospital and University Hospital -- suffered severe damage and flooding, as did the nearby Tulane University Hospital. Similar horrors unfolded at the Tulane hospital as doctors and residents worked in deteriorating conditions to save patients. Jeff L. Myers, chief of pediatric heart surgery at the Tulane hospital, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that doctors and staff members had worked with no power, blown-out windows, and rising floodwaters inside the hospital.
“There were big military helicopters airlifting people out while people in the streets were shooting back at them,” he said. “We had a Marine sniper on the roof with us. That’s about as close to a military situation as I ever want to be in.” All of the patients and staff members at the Tulane hospital eventually made it out, while two patients at Charity Hospital died while waiting to be evacuated.
Dr. Myers is staying with relatives in Minnesota until he learns when and where the medical school will reopen. Tulane officials are expected to announce plans for the medical school today. The university’s president said on Tuesday that he hoped to reopen the main, nonmedical campus for the spring semester. (See a related article.)
Many patients evacuated from the downtown teaching hospitals ended up at LSU’s flagship campus here, where athletics facilities have been transformed into an 800-bed field hospital -- the largest such hospital in U.S. history, medical-school officials said.
The field hospital has treated about 6,000 patients. Many of them had suffered from dehydration and exposure, while some were in renal failure or were critically ill because they had not been able to take life-sustaining medications.
Leslie Capo, a spokeswoman for the Health Sciences Center who served on its emergency-response team, was sleeping in an inflatable bed in her daughter’s dormitory at LSU, the fate of her home in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie uncertain. “Keeping busy means I don’t have time to worry about that,” she said as she dashed to a meeting with university officials. She later found out that her roof was badly damaged but that, so far, the house was not flooded.
As classes here started on Tuesday, the picturesque campus was a sea of activity, with thousands of students, hundreds of storm evacuees, U.S. Border Patrol agents, and National Guard troops all crowded together. Helicopters whirred overhead, ambulance sirens wailed, and convoys of buses filled campus parking lots as streams of storm refugees continued to descend on the campus. Staffers at New Orleans’s major newspaper, The Times-Picayune, were working out of a makeshift newsroom in LSU’s journalism school.
On Saturday, William L. Jenkins, president of the Louisiana State University System, distributed hugs and handshakes as he toured the campus, which is about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans and was spared serious damage in the storm. He pointed out a conference room where four University of New Orleans administrators were answering telephone calls from worried students and staff members. (The New Orleans university, which is part of the LSU system, has temporarily relocated to the system office.)
A few doors down, the university’s Health Sciences Center was represented by a handful of employees and student volunteers who manned phones and computers. A tower of Krispy Kreme doughnut boxes teetered on a chair, next to a drained coffeepot. Staff members, many in shorts and T-shirts they had slept in, watched with dazed expressions as images of the destruction flashed on a large-screen TV.
Dr. Jenkins did his best to keep the mood upbeat. “Almost everyone in that room abandoned homes that are now under water, but their greatest concern is for the faculty and students,” he said. “You’re going to watch an amazing transformation,” he predicted.
His cellphone rang, and it was James Aiken, a clinical professor of emergency medicine, confirming that he had made it out of New Orleans safely, nearly five days after the hurricane struck. Dr. Aiken, who also serves as medical director for emergency preparedness for the university system, was in the last group evacuated from Charity Hospital.
“The conditions were horrendous,” Dr. Aiken said after Dr. Jenkins handed the phone to a Chronicle reporter. “The power went out when the generators flooded, and we had to ventilate patients manually.” He said doctors had carried critically-ill patients up eight flights of stairs in darkened, rat-infested stairwells to the hospital’s rooftops, where they were met by sniper fire -- from unknown sources, for unknown reasons -- as they tried to load patients onto waiting helicopters. Meanwhile, hundreds of panicked evacuees were pounding on the hospital doors, trying to get in. The stench of human waste and decomposing corpses was almost unbearable, he said. Since the hospital’s morgue had flooded, bodies of the dead were stored in stairwells.
Among those holed up in the adjacent medical-education building last week were Joseph M. Moerschbaecher, the Health Science Center’s vice chancellor for academic affairs, along with 90 medical students, many of them foreign students with their families, and 70 faculty and staff members. “We came together as a tight-knit community,” Dr. Moerschbaecher said in an interview on Saturday in Baton Rouge. Even though they all escaped safely, years worth of research was destroyed, as well as mice, dogs, and “some monkeys I’d had for 20 years.”
The week also had its bizarre moments, like the time an inebriated man swam by, gesturing wildly that he wanted in. The group decided, reluctantly, to throw him a line, but, worried that he might attack them or their supplies, they locked him in an equipment cage until he sobered up. Then they sent him swimming to the next hospital, Dr. Moerschbaecher recounted.
Two brothers who rode out the storm in another part of the medical-school complex were waiting on Saturday in the lobby of the system office for their parents to take them home to Chicago. Mohaned Joudeh, a second-year medical student, and his brother Yazen Joudeh, a fourth-year student, looked ragged and exhausted with beards they had grown during the ordeal. They tripped over each other’s words as they tried to recount their odyssey of escape.
Mohaned was immersed in his studies for an examination when the evacuation warnings began. “I was worried that if I left, I wouldn’t be able to get back in time for my exam,” he said. “I guess I didn’t really focus on it. It was like, ‘Another Louisiana hurricane -- whatever.’ Besides, I was in a 10-story building, so I figured the worst that would happen is that we’d be out of power for a day or two.”
When the group was finally evacuated, on Friday night, the brothers were dropped off on a trash-strewn, elevated portion of Interstate 10, where they waited in the dark with hundreds of other stranded evacuees. A group from Xavier University of Louisiana also spent many hours there before being rescued (The Chronicle, September 2). Most people were panicking about getting home. Yazen Joudeh said he was also worried about his medical career. “I’m thinking, What are we going to do about our education? We can’t get out and make calls to find out.”
After several hours of waiting, the brothers were transported to the crowded and chaotic New Orleans airport, where dazed refugees were lying on urine-soaked floors. After about four hours there, they found other LSU evacuees and were taken by bus to the Baton Rouge campus.
One of the biggest challenges for the medical school now is persuading its faculty members and researchers to stay on. Even though faculty and staff members are being paid, many are discouraged and frustrated, and some are are accepting offers from other institutions.
“We’re trying to do everything we can to hang on to these people, but it’s a real struggle,” said Charles Zewe, a special assistant to the LSU system president. Already, he said, the medical school had lost three key faculty members to other institutions. The school’s buildings are flooded with up to six feet of water, and its state-of-the-art simulation laboratory, where medical students practice operating on computerized “patients,” is badly damaged.
“The health-sciences leadership is doing everything it can to provide housing and research and lab space as quickly as we can,” said Mr. Zewe. “It’s not easy to pick up a medical school and move it 90 miles down the road, but we’re asking everyone to give us a couple of weeks. We can’t make it whole again, but we will be back.”
Background articles from The Chronicle:
