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

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 they had to spend, millions of dollars in at least onecase. The initiative never went anywhere, and that was why, the day before Katrina made landfall, the federal emergency management officer had been told that all but two of the hospitals in New Orleans had either generators, electrical switches, or both at ground level.
    That was the case at Memorial. After Hurricane Ivan’s near miss in September 2004, the hospital’s leaders had reviewed hurricane plans. Eric Yancovich himself attended a meeting with the US Army Corps of Engineers and studied government storm-surge models—known as “SLOSH” for sea, lake, and overland surges from hurricanes—which estimated the height of a wall of water driven onto land by a hurricane’s winds. He learned that if a Category Four or Five storm hit the city and caused the lake or the river to flood it, twelve to fifteen feet of water could rise up around Memorial, which sat three feet below sea level.
    By hand, on a piece of lined paper after the Army Corps of Engineers meeting, Yancovich had sketched out the elevation of various hospital entrances and critical outdoor equipment in relation to the center of Magnolia Street, a narrow road perpendicular to Napoleon Avenue that ran along the back side of the hospital. His calculations showed it would take less than four feet of street flooding for water to flow over the loading dock and into the hospital. He knew that while the hospital’s backup generators on the second floor were at a safe elevation, some critical parts of the emergency power distribution system were located below ground level or only inches to a few feet above it.
    The story this told was clear and grim. “Based on these readings it won’t take much water in height to disable the majority of the Medical Center,” Yancovich had written in a note to his supervisor several months before Katrina. He predicted that power would be lost in the main hospital and all patients would have to be moved to the newer Clara Wing, where he believed the electrical circuitry was better protected.
    Yancovich’s department had taken a few steps to harden the hospital’s defenses, including adding floodgates and raising the vent for the underground diesel fuel tanks. But more extensive work needed to bedone. Yancovich had recommended elevating basement and ground-level emergency power transfer switches and the pumps that supplied most of the hospital with medical air and vacuum suction, needed by patients with respiratory problems. A partial bid for the electrical work came to more than a quarter of a million dollars. “Due to the lack of capital, I don’t anticipate anything being approved right now,” Yancovich had concluded in his recent memo. “I’ll keep it on file for future