Remembering Katrina

Today seem as good day to bring attention to Through Hell and High Water, a phenomenal series of articles which appeared this past May in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The series chronicles the events at Charity Hospital and Tulane Hospital in New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina.

The tale is gripping and horrifying and elating. It reveals the despair and hope and heroism which infects all groups of humans in times of crisis. Imperfect people doing miraculous things. The difference that money makes. The difference between the private sector and the public sector. And plain, raw humanity.

Below the fold is a brief summarizing quote from the first of 22 articles. Please, please read the whole thing.

What happened to these two hospitals — and the hundreds of patients like Hunter Reeves and Preston Johnson marooned inside — is a metaphor for what happened to the city itself. The private hospital had lifelines and outside resources, as did many New Orleanians who escaped that week. The public hospital, an institution for the needy, had to rely on the government for help and wound up stranded, as did so many of New Orleans’ poorest. For the sickest patients at Charity, the government never arrived.

But the story of what unfolded inside Tulane and Charity is a tale not just of what went wrong, but of all that went right.

It is a chronicle of human goodness and ingenuity. Faced with an unprecedented loss of emergency power, medical professionals frantically rigged up crude devices and used their own hands to pump life into their patients. Stripped of the medical technology they had come to rely on, they could offer only Third World health care. Yet the result was a profound reconnection to the humanity of their patients. Each was no longer just a diagnosis.

It is also the tale of a daring helicopter rescue, a clash of hospital cultures, and a company that acted decisively and creatively, sparing no expense to save its people and patients.

The rescue operation was not perfect. People died. But many more lived. The perception of what happened depended on which side of the street the viewer was on.

But one thing is indisputable: More people would have died had individuals on both sides of Tulane Avenue not risked their own lives to save them.