Katrina Hospitals Victims “Literally dead in the water”

Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, much has been written about deaths that could have been prevented but for the negligence of various institutions.  We’ve covered the responsibility of the Army Corps of Engineers,  and its “monumental negligence” for not maintaining the levees that collapsed.  But now, we are finding out that many excruciating deaths in hospital and nursing homes could have been prevented too.

A joint project of the New York Times and ProPublica has reported on a massive corporate failure at New Orleans hospitals to establish emergency backup power systems, causing patients to slowly die as they “languished for days awaiting transport.”

In fact, three years before Katrina, one of Pendleton Memorial Methodist Hospital’s senior executives wrote in a report that the hospital lacked the amount of generators needed “to accommodate an emergency flood with 15 feet of water,” and that one of hospital’s two main generators would be “nonfunctional in about two feet of flood water.”  The report, written in response to similar flooding that had already occurred in Texas, recommended that a $7.5 million fix be undertaken to avert such a disaster.  That warning was never heeded.

One of the patients who died at Pendelton was 73-year-old Althea LaCoste.  In her family’s lawsuit, they say she died horribly and, in turns out, unnecessarily, in “sweltering heat after nurses spent hours pumping air into her lungs by hand in the pitch dark...". 

Meanwhile, according to Robert Wise, vice-president of the Joint Commission, the accreditation body for most American hospitals, “There are many [hospitals] that still know they have to move their generator,” and that without power, will be “literally dead in the water.”

It seems there’s simply no end to the institutional negligence surrounding Hurricane Katrina.