Being a First Responder after a Hurricane

Hurricane Camille hit the Gulf Coast of Mississippi in August 1969. I had been in New Orleans since January of that year, fresh out of Chicago and barely knew how to spell hurricane, let alone had ever seen one.

My next door neighbor was Maggie Russell, MD. She was doing a psychiatric residency having just come out of a successful family practice.  We evacuated because I saw birds flying North in the middle of August. Made sense to me.

After the storm hit, Civil Defense arrived to take volunteers to help. Because Maggie was an MD, she was first in line. She gave me a white coat and called me an MD as well. I wondered about their being two Dr Russells, but she said no one would notice and she was right.

We flew across Bay St Louis in a helicopter, not to return to New Orleans for over a month.

  

First thing we did was assess the situation and realize there were few injuries that required hospitalization. Either the people there were slightly injured or they were dead.

We set up field hospitals from Pass Christian to Gulfport. The hospitals weren’t much. We stole from drug stores to get aspirin and rubbing alcohol. There was no running water and we needed to wash our hands somehow. Alcohol did the trick. 

We rubbed any marks off the aspirin tablets so no one would know what they were and gave them out like M and M’s warning people to lie down after taking them as they were powerful tranquilizers. People did what we said because we had white coats on.

Most of the people who came to the field hospitals were people who had everything they owned in a shopping bag and most of them could not find any other members of their families or friends. For that matter, they couldn’t find their houses either.

Beside putting bandaids on, cleaning scrapes and bruises, I had one job, only one job. By day two we had military help driving what they called a 6 by 6.  They went everywhere collecting corpses. We had them lined up in the area just outside the high school where we had our hospital.

I had the guys stack the bodies in 5's. Four side by side and one across, so I could count them easily.  

Every night, Walter Cronkite sent a runner over to get a new body count.  I would count the ever increasing stacks and send the runner back with the new numbers.

After a few days, Maggie and I had a chance to take a break. We walked among the corpses and noticed something we had not seen before. Some of the dead had their Sunday best clothing on. Wool suits or dresses - remember, this was mid August on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Suddenly we realized at almost the same time that some of these folks were long dead, were not killed in the storm at all, but had been pushed up out of the ground by flood waters.

The same thing happened after Katrina, but by then we knew what it was. In 1969, we didn't.

So when Cronkite’s runner arrived that night, I realized I did not have a correct count and perhaps never would. I tried to explain, but could not. So Walter never got a correct number. 

To this day, no one really knows how many fatalities Hurricane Camille produced. 

I had one job, only one job…..

WAITING FOR NORMAL Betcha Didn't Know

Betcha didn't know that in 1987 the Army Corp Of Engineers contracted with a private company to survey the levee system in south Louisiana for its ability to with stand storm surges and the raging flood waters that always come with hurricanes.  The results of the survey were that the levee  system was crap, levees would NOT be able to withstand these dangerous waters.  They would leak, sprout holes, crumble, disintegrate.   How do I know this?  My brother was one of the surveyors.

Betcha didn't know that it was the failure of the levee system after the hurricane that caused the deadly and destructive flooding in the Greater New Orleans area.  Let us not deny Katrina her due. She was a mighty wind and she blew a 25 foot storm surge miles inland along the coast. But after the wind was gone, so were the storm surge waters.  Then the waters that the levees were supposed to hold back came snaking through the streets like some evil sea serpent.  I know ´cause of the first hand accounts from many of my friends and clients.

Betcha didn't know that as Hurricane Katrina roared in that Sunday in August, people were still trying to evacuate, using the twin spans over Lake Pontchatrain to get out of New Orleans. Many tried but never made it across this high rise to the other side and safety.  Why not?  'Cause those spans began to twist and turn and slip and slide and, either tilt enough so the evacuees' vehicles just slipped into Lake Pontchartrain, or the entire span just fell down, down, down into those murky waters. I know ´cause a first responder, a guy who saw those cars and those people, told me

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Betcha didn't know  that hospitals are routinely built with the a/c system, the water pumps, the generators, the pharmacy, the cafeteria, and other vital materials and equipment in the basement. MEN!  Now, no matter if the water came from the storm surge or the levee failure, it went into the basement first.  And there went the ¨vital organs¨ of the hospital.  Medical staff and patients left behind soon had little or nothing to eat or drink, no medications, no medical equipment.  Of course, there was also no running water, no flushing commodes, no electricity...you know... nothing.  Lots of people died in those nursing homes and hospitals. I know because doctors and nurses who were there told me so.

Betcha didn´t know that concrete floats.  Yep.  Althea floated for several miles, to my friend´s front yard. Let´s call my friend Linda.  Althea lay there, day after day, week after week, month after month.  Over a year Althea laid near my friend´s front door, encased in a twelve foot long by four foot wide by three foot high concrete sarcophagus.  Linda did not know from where Althea had floated, but she´d reports from other folks in Slidell that various large, concrete tombs were scattered around... lotsa homeless dead people.  Initially, Linda was discombobulated by Althea´s presence.  But soon she thought of a solution to this invasion of her privacy.  ¨Well,¨Linda told me, "Ëvery morning, when I go to work, I pass by and touch the tomb and say, ´Good Morning, Althea, have a nice day´... And when I come home, I walk near enough for her to hear me say, ´Hope you had a nice day, Althea.´¨

Have a good day, Althea.