Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

The injured ICU nurse has suffered serious rib and internal bruises but no broken bones; he spends three days in a Baton Rouge hospital mainly for dehydration. Mulderick and other staffers are helicoptered to a nearby airport: “She and her exhausted colleagues [are] asked to care for people there” (238). 

Some staff and a few hospital executives are helicoptered directly to another Tenet hospital “and given a hot meal and a room to shower, shave, and change” (238). From there the executives are flown to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where they leave on private jets “to their preferred destinations” (238). Tenet supplies many hospital employees with bus transport to an upscale hotel in Dallas where they receive rooms and food vouchers.

Several days after everyone has been evacuated from Memorial, disaster teams return to the hospital to find an extreme stench: “[T]hey recovered forty-five bodies from the chapel, morgues, hallways, LifeCare floor, and the emergency room” (230). A news team interviews Dr. Pou, who says: “We all did everything in our power to give the best treatment that we could to the patients in the hospital, to make them comfortable” (230). 

Other hospitals suffer casualties. At St. Rita’s nursing home, 30 residents drown; at Touro Infirmary, sixteen bodies are found, possibly euthanized.