Posted on 10/10/2005 12:54:11 PM PDT by abb
Two lobbying groups, chosen by Louisiana to collect emergency requests from hospitals and nursing homes during Hurricane Katrina, found themselves instead scrambling to arrange private rescues when government teams became preoccupied with plucking citizens off rooftops.
The inability to quickly direct National Guard and other government rescue teams to health care facilities had deadly consequences.
Dozens of fragile patients died in sweltering heat and other taxing conditions that lasted for days.
A Catholic nun reported trying for four days to get rescuers to her nursing home, only to watch them pass by in the street. Another home administrator, trapped amid looting and chaos, carried a gun for the first time in his life just to protect patients.
It wasn't supposed to happen that way.
"We are an advocacy organization on behalf of hospitals. Overnight we turned into a hospital emergency center," Louisiana Hospital Association president John Matessino said, summing up how his group rose to rescue coordination amid the chaos.
Some are now asking why lobbyists, instead of emergency experts, were left to devise life-and-death solutions by patching together church and tour buses, private ambulances and religious volunteers.
The state gave both the Louisiana Nursing Home Association and the Louisiana Hospital Association permanent seats at the state emergency operations center in Baton Rouge and trained them to track health facility needs and relay information to authorities who would dispatch the help.
But that plan disintegrated under the magnitude of Katrina's destruction, leaving the lobbying groups to scramble to find private alternatives when government rescuers couldn't get to facilities.
(Excerpt) Read more at nola.com ...
Bump! I think he and you are right. And I used to call that place "home".
Yeah, agreed. Mike Brown moreso looks today like the sacrificial bunny while the state of Louisiana continues on as dysfunctional as beyond criminal can be. Over two hundred billion dollars more, they ask taxpayers to give them, and perhaps getting Brown out of the picture and denigrating FEMA was part of the process to limit the complaints about the dysfunction. Is there no one in the entire state of Louisiana who understands what personal responsibility means?
Correct.
And they still are...
Nope...now it's spending and stealing money. No one does that better than NO and LA.
Try going the the LA state FEMA website and looking at that few of the "resumes" of key state planners and staff.... you will see why Brown was correct.
In an emergency people are always asked to do things they don't usually do or are maybe not even trained to do.
I transported patients to another healthcare facility when they were brought to our hospital. I work in IS but they needed someone to drive and I did it. I also helped patients coming in the door to the triage areas we had set up.
We were all doing what needed to be done. It was an emergency.
I spoke to a St. Bernard parish resident who asked for flood insurance but his insurance company told him no because he did not live in a flood zone. He lost everything. A lot of people did have flood insurance to be honest, those who didn't probably are like the gentleman I spoke with from St. Bernard parish.
[[Is there no one in the entire state of Louisiana who understands what personal responsibility means?]]
Um, the Southwestern part of the state has been doing just fine after getting whacked by Rita. There are competent leaders here. This part of the state is conservative and nothing like NOLA. Rita was as strong as Katrina but because the locals are competent nothing has been said after the first couple of days past the storm.
Sounds like everyone in authority is running around trying to cover their butts. They have an answer/excuse for everything.
Well, one would never know that -- and most don't -- when listening to LA Senator Ms. L.
Who, supposedly, speaks for the entire state.
Well trust me when I say that Ms. Mary mainly speaks for her stomping grounds NOLA. She's whining loudly because her voter base has been scattered to the winds and they were the ONLY reason she got in office. That city and region has sucked the state's resources dry for decades. My uncle use to say that the only thing he would vote for New Orleans would be for dynamite to blow the levees.
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