Louisiana hospitals were already overwhelmed by COVID-19 when Hurricane Ida delivered another catastrophe. Medical facilities usually evacuate before big storms. This time, their patients were too sick. So the staff stayed — and prayed.
One of the most powerful hurricanes in the nation’s history was barreling into south Louisiana. Fifty miles southwest of New Orleans, the staff at Leonard J. Chabert Medical Center in Houma was already weary from a year and a half of caring for patients with COVID-19.
Across town, huge sections of the roof blew off Terrebonne General Health System, the largest hospital in Terrebonne Parish, whose bayous brimming with sinewy cypress trees run through the region like veins. Water poured in so quickly it looked like it was raining inside. The windows shattered, the walls shook and it sounded like a freight train.
Burnell has been an emergency physician for almost 30 years, and he said this is among the worst storms he’s been through, arriving as it did just as the state’s COVID deaths soared and its vaccination rate remained among the lowest in the country.“We have the perfect twin-demic going on,” Burnell said. “This could not have happened at a worse time. Mother Nature was not kind to us.”In the spring of 2020, as Louisiana became one of the first places in the U.S.
“We have a metal box where everything’s flying around at you,” said Burnell, the medical director. “It is a cesspool of COVID. I tell people there is a COVID fog in every ambulance.” Chabert hospital’s chief nursing officer, Jana Semere, said some nurses are burning out and leaving the profession after grueling 60-hour weeks filled with an unrelenting flow of COVID patients. Of Chabert’s eight ICU beds, they can only staff six: They simply don’t have the staff power amid a nationwide shortage of nurses.
Acadian Ambulance dispatcher Bart Savoy answers calls from those frantically seeking medical assistance. The power went out at Terrebonne General around 3 p.m. the Sunday the storm rolled in and for 10 seconds the staff stood in darkness. Nurses ran toward the intensive-care beds, where the worst COVID patients depended on ventilators to breathe. The back-up batteries were fully charged, but still they prayed.The hospital anticipated flooding but now water was coming from above. Parts of the roof had flown off, and the pounding rain flooded the fifth floor.
Admitting defeat to the storm was agonizing for those who work in this hospital and have cared for their community for generations. The generators held, but like Terrebonne General, the hospital lost water and air conditioning. As the storm raged, a bleeding man arrived to drop off his fiancée, who had been sucked out of their wrecked home a few blocks away. The emergency room staff got to work mending her wounds as water poured from the ceiling.The staff was too scared to trust the elevators so they ran up and down the stairs, five flights, slippery from water and howling in the wind. They had no working bathrooms.
“I had COVID patients with no air conditioning. And it’s already hard for them to breathe. Imagine how that must have felt,” she said. “The floor was soaked, it was sweating.”When Semere heard the sirens in the distance at dawn, she went to the loading dock and watched a parade of ambulances pull into the lot. She wept.Early in the morning after the hurricane, emergency medical technician Caitlyn Rappé raced up the stairs of a storm-battered house.
EMTs and paramedics fanned across south Louisiana in the days after Ida struck, responding to everything from heart attacks to scrapes and bruises to low blood sugar. Terrebonne General was so badly damaged it remains closed, save a makeshift emergency room set up in tents across the street. The ER at Chabert has reopened, but the generator still trips every so often, briefly leaving the hospital in darkness. Medical staff are trying to patch the holes, sweep up the debris, wipe down the floors and begin the process of recovery. But what awaits them on the other side is grim.
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