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

consideration.”
    The backup generator system was only as robust as its weakest part. Now, with floodwaters heading for Memorial, it was the hospital’s Achilles’ heel. They all needed to get out of the hospital. Yancovich knew it. Susan Mulderick knew it. She advised Memorial CEO René Goux, who spoke with his bosses at Tenet, in Dallas. He told them that evacuation looked likely.

    “WHERE’S VINCE?”
    The nurse asking about Dr. Anna Pou’s husband looked concerned. Vince Panepinto had surprised Pou the previous evening by showing up at the hospital. A security guard had paged her through the overhead speakers. Panepinto had spent the night with Pou and the surgical nurses in the endoscopy suite, his tall frame squeezed onto a little stretcher. He charmed the nurses with his dark good looks, and they agreed Pou had done well after the breakup with her former boyfriend.
    Panepinto left the hospital that morning to take care of their recently purchased home about a mile from Memorial. He had wanted Pou to join him, but she still had patients at the hospital, and the staff was not supposed to leave. “I’ll be home before you know it,” she’d told him.
    “Oh my God, you need to get him,” the nurse said. “Look outside.” Pou joined her at the windows overlooking Clara Street. Water was gushing out of the sewer vents. They stared in disbelief. Then theyjogged up three flights of stairs to the eighth floor to get a better look at the neighborhood. Water was flowing up Claiborne Avenue, a main city artery just north of the hospital.
    Faces appeared at windows all over Memorial. Some doctors would later say the sight of the water advancing toward the hospital, pushing the hurricane debris ahead of it, was like something out of a movie: a glob of murderous slime from a ’60s sci-fi thriller, or the mist-cloaked Angel of Death wafting down Egyptian streets to envelop the homes of firstborn sons in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments . To a LifeCare patient’s daughter, Angela McManus, who was standing on Memorial’s smoking balcony, the blackness overtaking the ground looked like the shadow of a cloud.
    A doctor told ICU nurse Cathy Green the water was coming back. “The water’s coming back?” she asked. “From the river?” No, the doctor told her, not from the Mississippi River, from the lake. “From the lake? Our lake? Lake Pontchartrain, our lake?”
    The doctor told Green that water from the massive saltwater estuary north of the city had already reached Claiborne Avenue. Green attempted a calculation. The intersection was probably fifty city blocks from the lakefront.
    This told her that the water wasn’t a meandering stream. It was like something she had watched on television the previous December, video footage of curious Indian Ocean beachgoers staring at a distant, muscular wave that failed to subside after breaking and instead punched across the sand, the gathering torrent of a tsunami about to flatten them.
    There were certain signs, devastating signs, that told Green that an ICU patient was “crashing” toward death. This was that sign. We did not dodge a bullet, she thought. Lake Pontchartrain is emptying into our city. Very bad news is coming. It was the moment that everything changed.
    Anna Pou kept calling her husband’s cell phone. There was no answer.

    NEWS OF THE waters prompted an unplanned midmorning meeting in the command center. It was hot, and someone bashed out the windows with a two-foot-high metal oxygen tank. Susan Mulderick announced that up to fifteen feet was expected around the hospital. Despite Memorial’s flood-prone electrical system, its voluminous set of emergency plans did not contemplate the precise scenario they were facing, almost as if it would have been too horrible to countenance. Mulderick’s emergency committee had ranked hurricanes, floods, and power outages among the highest-priority emergencies, but the hospital’s preparedness plan for