"If we could have had some notice that the levee system had failed, rather than just watching as the water rose, we could have better anticipated the need for vertical evacuations inside the facilities," said Dr. Cathi Fontenot, medical director of the Charity Hospital and University Hospital campuses, at a field hearing of the House's Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.
"We felt prepared for even a major hurricane like Katrina," added Rene Goux, CEO of Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans. "What we couldn't be ready for was a flood coupled with the failure of the levees and municipal pumping system that closed all the other nearby hospitals and stranded all of us inside Memorial without municipal power, water and sanitation for four days."
One after another, hospital officials testified that the lack of reliable communications turned out to be their greatest challenge.
Once the hospitals' generators were flooded, staff and families of patients were faced with unimaginable conditions. In the darkness, heroes emerged.
"Family members - including teen-agers and young kids - stood for hour upon hour upon hour fanning our patients by hand and bathing them with bottled water," said Memorial's Goux. "None of the elevators were working, so we had to carry patients up stairwells to the helipad or down to the boats -- some as many as eight flights."
But evacuation operations were hamstrung because so few staffers could talk to one another, and no one could reach the rescuers outside. When cell phones and satellite links went dead, health care officials were forced to use ham radios. In a few cases, pay phones became lifelines to the outside world.
Legislation authored by the Energy and Commerce Committee offers great promise to enhance first-responder communication capabilities.S.1932 requires TV and radio broadcasters to vacate critical radio frequencies by Feb. 17, 2009, clearing the way for emergency workers to adopt cutting-edge communications equipment to use over those wavelengths. The bill, which also makes up to $1 billion available to help public safety agencies obtain and deploy interoperable communications systems, is expected win final passage in early February and has the backing of President Bush.
Ensuring reliable backup generators, especially in flood-prone areas, was another key lesson from Katrina. A number of hospitals are now considering relocating generators to higher floors.
In other testimony, Donald Smithburg, executive vice president of the Louisiana State University System and CEO of the Health Care Services Division, urged Congress to temporarily waive the state's share of Medicaid costs, or "match." S. 1932 would also address that need. The bill allocates more than $2 billion to help Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi cover Medicaid expenses by lifting the three states' match requirements for costs incurred between August 28, 2005 and May 15, 2006.
On Wednesday, subcommittee members toured ravaged portions of the Crescent City area and saw the damage close up. In addition, they saw several hospitals that were flooded, and remain closed, as well as a temporary care center operating out of the Convention Center.
"I was really overwhelmed by the devastation we saw," said subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield, R-Ky. "I don't really think people in the rest of the nation have an appreciation of how truly devastating the storm was. I encourage all congressmen and senators to visit."
"There's no way you can know, sitting in Washington, D.C. or Denver, what people went through here," added U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo. "We are in awe of everybody here. Everyone in both the private and public hospitals really fulfilled their mission as public health officials."
Members of both parties expressed concern about the upcoming Mardi Gras season overwhelming strained hospitals and pledged to help support efforts to rebuild the city's health infrastructure. And LSU's Smithburg raised the possibility that, at least in the interim, the city's residents could be costlier to care for than in years past.
"While the population may be smaller," he said, "The number of uninsured will be even larger. The work of rebuilding New Orleans will be done by low wage workers in high-risk occupations with little or no access to health insurance."
