Dr. Peter De Blieux struggled for four days to get desperate and impoverished patients safely out of flooded Charity Hospital in downtown New Orleans. Now he is fighting to get them back.
Dr. Ben deBoisblanc watched in frustration as helicopter after helicopter swept away patients and even able-bodied staff from the for-profit hospital across the flooded street from Charity, while two of his own desperately ill patients died after waiting for hours for help.
Three weeks later Charity Hospital sits empty and dark. Clean sheets cover the examining tables in the emergency room and hallways once filled with four days worth of human detritus are pristine.
Outside, De Blieux consults with Army Special Forces troops who helped drain the remaining putrid water from the basement so that bodies that have been sitting in the morgue since before the storm hit Aug. 29 can be removed.
Now as New Orleans struggles to recover, they say it is time to decide what kind of future they and their patients will have.
The future of the non-profit, aging Charity facility, part of the state-run Louisiana State University system, symbolizes the dilemmas that must be addressed.
'This will define us as a nation'
“I really believe that this will define us as a nation — how we respond to this,” deBoisblanc said in a telephone interview from his temporary home in Baton Rouge.
“We are either going to do it right or we are going to do it wrong. I am not saying hand out a free Lexus to everybody who has been displaced. We have to be very, very careful that we don’t take these victims and somehow ostracize them because it’s inconvenient for us or makes our lives more difficult.”
Charity’s plight was one of the most dramatic stories to come out of the storm that first battered New Orleans and then drowned it with filthy water.
During the crisis, doctors, nurses and other staff carried their frailest patients upstairs as water filled the basement and shorted out the generators, and they pleaded for help that did not arrive for days.
The storm hit on a Monday, and on Wednesday staff were still pumping by hand to ventilate patients who could not breathe on their own.
The flood blew out the generators and backed up sewage, and the hospital began to stink of trash, sweat and human waste.
“It became obvious that FEMA was not going to come,” said deBoisblanc, who runs the intensive care units in the hospital, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“We were going to have to find our own way out.”
Black Hawks and ambulances
By Wednesday afternoon some of the trainee doctors, called residents, called up the television networks. A private helicopter operator promised to send aircraft if they could get the patients to a landing pad.
A canoe and a National Guard truck were waved down and four of the most desperate patients were ferried across the street to Tulane University’s hospital. One Charity patient got out. The good Samaritan’s helicopters were commandeered — probably by accident, said deBoisblanc — to remove three other patients.
Black Hawk helicopters with night vision eventually came to the rescue, and deBoisblanc went with one to a triage area on a highway cloverleaf intersection.
“What do you see but all these ambulances — dozens of ambulances. I asked how long have you all been there, and this guy said three days.”
Stunningly, no one had directed the ambulances to other locations where they could have been put to use.
'We waited and waited'
DeBoisblanc flew back to Charity and brought the remaining 30 or so intensive-care patients from his unit to Tulane hospital across the street.
Once there, “we waited and waited and waited as helicopter after helicopter landed and loaded up patients, which in some cases seems valid,” he said. “Other times able-bodied doctors, nurses and family members went while these patients sat on the rooftop.”
It was not completely cold-blooded, deBoisblanc said. Some helicopters were not configured to carry patients strapped to boards, and many people had been standing in a line of hundreds for hours, waiting to get out. It was dark; it was confusing.
But then a very large cargo helicopter arrived.
“It can hold 30 people,” deBoisblanc said. And it did — 30 people who walked aboard on their own.
“We stood there in disbelief that we had 30 patients there and there was no sense of priority of these sick patients over other patients. At the time I was pretty pissed off.”
Guards with guns were keeping order, said deBoisblanc, and no arguments were tolerated.
“It was a product of the lack of command and control structure,” he said. “It became survival of the fittest. There was no sense of shared resources.”
Cleaning out trash and human waste
People were struggling to take care of those they felt personally responsible for, deBoisblanc said.
But two patients died, including a frail old woman whose husband had sat by her side day and night, fanning her to keep her cool, and who had been expected to survive. They were separated at the end.
“She died being hugged by lots of wonderful nurses and residents who cradled her in their arms and petted her and told her it was all going to be OK. She did not die alone,” deBoisblanc said.
Some staff, like deBoisblanc, themselves became refugees after the last patient left the Friday after the storm. He has not been back.
De Blieux, who helped oversee the emergency department, commutes daily from his wife and young children in Baton Rouge to help clean up the hospital.
The building may be old, but it is filled with state-of-the-art equipment, including a hyperbaric chamber used to force oxygen into the tissues of seriously ill patients.
De Blieux and other volunteers have labored for days in the heat and darkness to clear out trash and human waste from the upper floors.
Hospital may never reopen to patients
Despite their efforts, the hospital may never reopen to patients. The flood fried the electricity panel and ruined the sewage system.
Charity’s administrators see an opportunity to replace the 1930s facility with something newer and better as New Orleans rebuilds and perhaps reinvents itself.
“Charity Hospital was an obsolete physical plant. The state had appropriated some money to pay for a new hospital — a state-of-the-art indigent care facility. So it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of money putting the hospital back together,” said deBoisblanc.
“We don’t have patients living in New Orleans. What makes more sense to me is as we re-populate the city, use a temporary facility.”
There is talk of bringing a hospital ship in, says deBoisblanc. But, he adds, “First of all we have got to make sure a new hospital is going to be built.”
But it would take four years to build one. Where would the poor of New Orleans go in the meantime?, De Blieux asked.
“It is the only indigent care facility in the city,” he said.
Like everywhere else in the United States, there are facilities for people with insurance but very little for those without — who include the so-called working poor.
The three big New Orleans hospitals that remained operating through Katrina’s fury and afterwards are run by for-profit corporations, and anyway they are in the suburbs, accessible only by car.
