How did New Orleans-area hospitals respond to Hurricane Katrina?
Except for at least one hospital west of the city that evacuated before the storm, hospitals rode out the storm. It was the flooding after Katrina that made evacuation necessary, not the hurricane itself. The area-wide loss of such essential services as power and water created the need to relocate patients, but the 11 hospitals that were surrounded by floodwater faced especially perilous challenges. Those hospitals housed more than 1,700 patients. Most were very ill, since hospitals had discharged whatever patients they could before the storm. Hospitals also became refuges for other people. According the Louisiana Hospital Association, more than 7,600 people besides patients were in those hospitals after Katrina. These included staff, relatives of patients, and other people who simply sought the hospital’s relative safety. Conditions in the stranded hospitals in the days after the storm were almost unimaginably terrible. The buildings lost power, temperatures soared, water and sewerage
