Two N.O. Charity Hospitals Evacuated

Patients from New Orleans’ two charity hospitals were finally evacuated Friday.

Efforts to get the ill and injured out of the flooded facility in downtown New Orleans were stalled several times over four days when snipers shot at helicopters. Doctors had to ration dwindling supplies of food, water and medicines.

Meanwhile, a 1,000-bed field hospital will be opened in north Baton Rouge to handle patients who survived the ordeal. The new hospital is the same property that LSU had just made a deal to purchase for a future outpatient clinic.

Fred Cerise, a physician and the secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals, shook his head as he recounted how he saw healthy people were evacuated Thursday while patients using ventilators to breathe were shunted aside.

An angered Cerise had worked three days tending patients in New Orleans but returned to Baton Rouge on Friday to get the evacuation effort moving.

The LSU Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans, consisting of Charity Hospital and University Hospital, is surrounded by deep water.

It is without electricity and water. The toilets don’t work. Some employees fed each other intravenously to prevent dehydration.

The hospital morgue is full but under water and bodies of dead patients are scattered though the ruined facility, said Don Smithburg, CEO of the LSU hospital system, which oversees the two public hospitals.

A total 363 patients, including 28 babies, were moved, he said. Three patients died in transit.

Only about 150 staff and students remain trapped in an isolated education building but they will be ferried out this morning, Smithburg said.

Hospital staffers found a previously unused passageway between University Hospital and Big Charity. They ferried patients to a staging area, where the sick and injured were loaded onto trucks to cross the street. Patients were wheeled through a Tulane University Hospital to a helicopter landing pad on the roof.

The evacuees then were flown to the Louis Armstrong International Airport in Kenner, Cerise said. From there the patients were sent to hospitals around Louisiana and other states.

Medical personnel found many of the most-critical patients were too sick to fly and were sent to Baton Rouge instead, Cerise said.

“We have this whole medical infrastructure in New Orleans that doesn’t exist anymore,” Cerise said. “We are creating a whole system of health care for those displaced.”

The LSU Earl K. Long Medical Center on Airline Highway is rushing to expand its intensive care unit for 16 more patients, he said.

Some of the most critically ill patients from New Orleans are going to private hospitals in Baton Rouge.

“We’ve seen between 75 and 100 sent here officially,” said Catherine Harrell, spokeswoman for Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center on Essen Lane. “We tend to see the more critically ill patients.”

Additionally, the Pete Maravich Assembly Center on the LSU campus can care for 200.

A 1,000-bed field hospital is being readied in a former Kmart building on Airline Highway to handle less-critical patients who survived the ordeal. LSU reached an agreement last month to purchase that property for use as an outpatient clinic.

The hospital will have air conditioning and all other utilities, said Smithburg.

Specially trained doctors from Parkland Hospital in Dallas will help start the facility, he said.

Mark Ballard of the Capitol news bureau contributed to this story.