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

scrambled eggs and bacon. (The sight of low-wage cooks tending the stoves in the swelter with tied-up hair and cut-off sleeves and scrub pants had awed one executive who came down to the kitchen seeking extra food for a patient. An employee turned and asked, “What you need, baby?” as if it were any other day.)
    Feeding not only the patients but also everyone else, it was thought, might help calm the hundreds of family members and hospital neighbors who had taken shelter at Memorial and were getting antsy. With downed trees and power lines on the streets and reports of flooding only blocks away, it wasn’t safe for people to leave, though many were trying. Some headed to a darkened Winn-Dixie supermarket about eight blocks away and returned, arms laden with diapers, food, and drinks. One described this as “soul surviving, surviving for the soul.” Others considered it looting.
    After the meeting broke up, a memo went out to reinforce what the command team had decided: “Incident Command has declared Survival Mode for Memorial Medical Center.”
    All staff and physicians were instructed to stay at the hospital. Family members were advised to stay too. The hospital could expect flooding. There would be no elective surgery and no MRIs, PET scans, or CTs.Medically 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