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More than 50 patients were evacuated on Aug. Nurses held the infants in their arms and manually pumped air into their lungs, hoping they'd make it through the trip to another hospital. Importantly, some of the patients, including newborns, still required medical attention during the transport. Once there, nurses had to carry patients up another two flights of stairs before they could reach transport. It was a long trek as staff carried patients down flights of stairs and through a 3-foot by 3-foot hole that led to the garage, where a pickup truck was waiting to drive them to the helipad.

Meanwhile, the Memorial nurses and doctors worked tirelessly to find a way to transport patients from the hospital to the helipad above the parking garage. How were patients rescued from Memorial Medical Care Center? When Fink spoke to Mulderick for the NYT, the incident commander said, 'We were well prepared. They ultimately decided that patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders would be saved last. patients would be at great risk from the heat and should get first priority.' Fink wrote, 'The doctors quickly agreed that babies in the neonatal intensive-care unit, pregnant mothers and critically ill adult I.C.U. While nurses tended to patients and administrators sought help from outside entities, Mulderick gathered the doctors and told them they needed to decide which of the remaining 180 patients would be evacuated first-and how.

Video of hurricane katrina aftermath how to#

'The 246-page document offered no guidance for dealing with a complete power failure,' Fink wrote, 'or for how to evacuate the hospital if the streets were flooded.' Susan Mulderick, was responsible for leading the doctors, but she faced a problem when she pulled out the hospital's emergency plans. The hospital's emergency-incident commander, Dr. How did doctors decide who to evacuate from Memorial Medical Care Center first? Hospital personnel warned higher-ups of this issue in 2004 but, as Fink wrote, 'Fixing the problem would be costly a few less-expensive improvements were made.' Once the water reached the box, the generators would stop working. The hospital's power box was only a few feet above ground level, leaving it vulnerable to the rising waters. While the flood walls and levees couldn't have been fortified in time, this knowledge could've informed FEMA's response, which Congress later described in a report as 'a failure of leadership.'Ĭase in point: Memorial Medical Care Center. But a year after the disaster, the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee discovered that government agencies had warned the White House about the potential damage 48 hours before the storm touched land, according to ABC. Bush, said at the time that nobody could have predicted the flooding. Officials, including then-President George W. As CBS News reported in 2006, nearby levees and flood walls had been damaged in the storm, sending a current of water into the surrounding area. 30, nurses and doctors were optimistic they had weathered the worst of the storm-until they began noticing the flood waters rising again. How did the flood waters impact the hospital?īy Aug.