Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink Read Free Book Online

and flushing toilets.
    The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, didn’t give his residents advice about the old
     ways. He ordered them to leave. At around ten a.m., he signed a mandatory, immediate
     evacuation order for the city. The order had been delayed by many precious hours,
     he would later admit, as his staff attempted to resolve logistical and legal questions,including whether he had the legal authority to issue it; as far as he knew, no previous
     New Orleans mayor had mandated an evacuation, although state law allowed the governor,
     parish presidents, and, by extension, him to do so.
    Nagin read his order aloud to the public at a press conference with Louisiana governor
     Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. He stood in a white polo shirt before the inscrutable New
     Orleans city seal, on which a wriggling green form prowled beneath a figure that suggested
     the Roman sea god Neptune. An amphora under the crook of his arm was tipped, its contents
     gushing. “The storm surge most likely will topple our levee system,” Nagin warned.
     “We are facing a storm that most of us have feared.” Flooding, Blanco added, could
     reach fifteen to twenty feet.
    While the mayor commanded everyone to leave, many didn’t have cars or other means
     to do so, and officials knew that the city’s plans to help transport them had significant
     holes, including a lack of sufficient drivers. Residents who could go on their own
     were already stuck in traffic on the interstate leading out of town. The Superdome,
     the giant stadium that hosted the New Orleans Saints football team, was designated
     as a “shelter of last resort.” New Orleanians who had no way to get out of the city
     could take a shuttle bus there. Mayor Nagin appealed to one population in particular.
     “If you have a medical condition, if you’re on dialysis or some other condition, we
     want you to expeditiously move to the Superdome,” he said. He didn’t mention what
     kind of help people could expect there.
    Many tourists whose flights had been canceled had no ability to flee on their own
     either, and so Nagin’s evacuation order exempted essential hotel workers to serve
     them. It also exempted essential criminal sheriff’s office workers, who were needed
     to keep their eyes on prisoners at the parish jail. They, too, were not being moved.
    A questioner at the press conference asked for a clarification: “People should stay
     put in the hospitals … or what?” The mayor said he had exempted hospitals and their
     workers. People might get hurt in the hurricane. If hospitals closed and turned them
     away, that would, he said, create “a very dangerous situation.”
    The possibility that a very dangerous situation could develop inside the hospitals
     if they stayed open had occurred to other officials who were, at that very moment,on a conference call discussing the matter. Louisiana had received more than $17 million
     from a federal grant program to help prepare its hospitals for bioterrorism and other
     emergencies after the September 11, 2001, attacks and subsequent anthrax mailings.
     A FEMA representative on the call wanted to know which hospitals in flood-prone regions
     of the state had located both their generators and electrical switching gear above
     ground-floor level. In and around New Orleans, only two out of about a dozen and a
     half hospitals had. Memorial was not one of them.
    An emergency response leader from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
     alerted several colleagues to the problem in an e-mail hours later. “It is assumed that many of the hospital generators will lose power given the expected
     height of the water.” He reported that around 2,500 hospital patients remained in
     New Orleans as Katrina advanced on the city. That should not have been a surprise.
     Planning sessions had gone on, after lengthy delays, for more than a year for a model
     “Hurricane Pam.” FEMA had sponsored an emergency exercise in New