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“Finally, if any of these residents have or had family, where in heck were you? If you couldn’t be there, why weren’t you on the phone to someone in authority when your loved ones were being warehoused?!”

I think I can enlighten you, since my father was in that mess. I live in central Iowa, and he has lived in New Orleans since 1968. He had a sudden major health crisis last year. Needed nursing home care (developing dementia, among other things) and he was too frail to stand a 1,000 mile transport or a plane trip to my neck of the woods.

The nursing home social worker called me up on Thursday ahead of the hurricane stating that they were moving the residents inland to a purpose-rehabbed state-of-the-art hurricane shelter for elderly nursing home evacuees built in a reinforced commercial building. It had been prepped and waiting. Full equipment, food service, pharmacy, air conditioning, a full complement of staff, and ample generator capacity was in place. The saintly nursing home chain owner was moving everybody without a mandatory evac order because he’s a radiant, golden-hearted specimen of humanity. NOTHING was said about a warehouse.

As soon as the storm blew over, I called one of the nursing home admin people for a status report. All of the above was repeated to me and more reassuring details besides. Bolstered by the fact that she claimed to have been on-site at this superior shelter for the previous 48 hours to eyewitness the heart-warming miracle personally. Everything was great. The residents were having a great time. Everything was brilliantly taken care of. No detail had been overlooked. Given the fact that New Orleans was a friggin disaster by this point, the story sounded like good news. They needed a few days for the experts to assess the vacated facilities for suitability of return. If that couldn’t be done, a brilliant master plan to safely relocate the people to other facilities was ready for implementation. My patience with them as they handled a serious and fluid situation with spotty communications was much appreciated.

Unfortunately, those people were spinning a pack of lies to everybody. They were denying entry to local families of residents there who traveled through wreckage to see their kin. They ejected inspectors from the Louisiana Dept of Health from the premises. They were not admitting that their incompetence had created a mess that had spun out of control. They didn’t ask for help to fix it. They barred the doors and flailed.

Nobody from the nursing home chain and none of the gov’t employees who shut that situation down and rescued those people notified me about the mess. Nobody told me that he was re-evacuated to another shelter in Bossier City. Or that he was then placed in a decent facility five hours away from New Orleans. Not one call. I learned about the problem from a Free Republic post. I instantly burned up the phones. No answer from the nursing home people. No answer at the Tangipahoa Parish sheriff’s office. I got action by calling the Louisiana State Police barracks for that area and demanding that they find out where my dad was.

Ten minutes later the skilled facility that had taken him in rang my phone. He’s fine now. He got there Friday night with his meds, the clothes he wore out of New Orleans, no chart, and no info to furnish a clue about how to contact his family. They have his chart now. The only thing he’s scared of is the possibility of going back to New Orleans. I’ll be on the phone with the administration there tomorrow morning to make damned sure that doesn’t happen. And to have their staff physician evaluate him to see if he’s now strong enough for a medical transport to the Midwest. If he is, I’ll find a way to pull $7,000 out of my ear for a licensed interstate medical transport. Meanwhile, he’s at a place that’s decent and competent. He’s feeling pretty good after a week from hell.

Finally, the owner had filed this evac plan and had it approved by the state—for, I believe, half the number of people he crammed into it, for half the number of days they were kept there, with a lot more staff than he actually put in place. This nursing home chain owner is a fatcat real estate developer with lots of political connections and a history of lavish political donations. And no, he won’t go to prison like he would damn near anywhere else but New York. In short, the old Louisiana story.

This might be TMI, but I thought your “where were the negligent families” query deserved a generous helping of info from someone who actually knows something. You’re welcome.