Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink Page A

stable patients were to be discharged, even though they may not have had
     anyplace to go or any way of leaving. Some were taken to the lobby in wheelchairs
     to wait. The head pharmacist was still scrambling to arrange for a drop-off from his
     supplier to replace the dwindling stores of medicines.
    Each department had to report to the command team by noon with a list of employees
     and family members present and an inventory of available medicines, supplies, equipment,
     and cell phones, as the hospital’s landlines worked only intermittently. The command
     team also sought any nurse with experience performing kidney dialysis. Patients in
     renal failure needed hours of dialysis every few days to clean their blood and remove
     fluid from their bodies, but the city’s dialysis clinics were closed. Their clients
     were showing up at the hospital, where there was only one dialysis nurse on hand for
     Memorial and LifeCare patients, including some of the new patients transferred from
     Chalmette. A nursing director from LifeCare and another nurse volunteered to help,
     and they tutored the kidney specialist, a doctor who was adept at ordering dialysis,
     not providing it.
    The dialysis procedure required water, but the city water was reportedly so heavily
     contaminated with chemicals and bacteria that it would be dangerous to bathe in it.
     The doctor faced a decision. The patients would die without dialysis, and it was unclear
     how quickly they could be transferred out of Memorial. Workers would filter the water
     and hope for the best. Staff members formed an assembly line to boil water in the
     microwave and stockpile it for other uses.
    Within view of the hospital windows people were ransacking a Walgreens. One Memorial
     administrator wrote an e-mail to her family at ten twenty in the morning describing
     what she had heard from the security supervisor.
    They are locking down the whole hospital to keep the looters out. We are under marshall
     law so our security officers can shoot to kill if they want.

    A NATIONAL GUARD soldier jogged up to a group of people mingling outside the hospital.
    “Who’s in charge?” he asked.
    “I am,” a short, muscular man in his early forties answered. Eric Yancovich was Memorial’s
     plant operations director and a member of the hospital’s emergency leadership team.
     He was outside snapping photographs to document the damage Katrina had caused the
     hospital. Blown-out windows and light fixtures. A collapsed penthouse. Bent antennas
     and exposed roof joints.
    The National Guardsman told him the levees protecting New Orleans had been breached.
     “You need to prepare for fifteen feet of water,” he said. “Yeah right,” Yancovich
     muttered. Then he saw the soldier wasn’t kidding. “Will you come into the command
     center?” Yancovich asked. “Because I’m not bringing this news in by myself.”
    Yancovich knew they were in trouble. The design of Memorial’s backup power system
     had a flaw all too common in flood zones, the one that the state and federal emergency
     officials had discussed in their conference call immediately before the storm. WhenTropical Storm Allison inundated Houston in 2001, hospitals in the nation’s largest
     medical complex, Texas Medical Center, lost power because either emergency generators
     or their various electrical components were located below flood level. News of the
     incident had alarmed New Orleans’s health director, Dr. Kevin Stephens. The following
     year, he had surveyed representatives of every hospital in the city, asking whether
     they could withstand a flood with fifteen feet of water, how much it would cost to
     elevate generators if needed, and whether there was interest in having the city look
     into the possibility of federal funding to make improvements. One letter went to Memorial’s
     emergency committee head, Susan Mulderick.
    The response from the hospitals was unenthusiastic. It would cost much more than