Excerpts from Lethal chaos: Professor describes scene at New Orleans hospital by Jennifer Van Bergen in Raw Story

A first-hand account of the New Orleans devastation from leading human rights attorney, Loyola University law professor Bill Quigley, who volunteered at New Orleans Memorial Hospital where his wife was a nurse, and was marooned there when the flood waters rose.

The power went out early Monday. The sickest patients, roughly seventy or so, were evacuated by helicopter Sunday. Not until Wednesday morning did more helicopters appear. Quigley and other volunteers tried to get the attention of the numerous helicopters they could see hovering over the city. The sickest patients were brought up eight flights of stairs in sheet slings to the roof. Some patients were kept on the roof as long as 24 hours.

“We were standing there waving a sheet to get their attention,” he said.

Quigley says they saw helicopters from the Red Cross, the National Guard, the Coast Guard and the Army. One Army helicopter, which the volunteers on the roof managed to “flag down” wouldn’t land and refused to take anyone, even those remaining critically ill patients, because “they were full with rescue workers and could only pick up individuals one at a time off of roofs, which they stated they had been doing all day.”

After that the helicopters never returned to Memorial Hospital.

Tulane University Hospital had been evacuated, Quigley heard, but those at Memorial “were left to die or get out as best they could.”

At least ten patients died while awaiting rescue workers. Many died because their life-sustaining medical treatment required electricity.

As the hours and days wore on and no help came, floodwaters continued to rise. Medication and supplies ran out. Quigley says he saw no National Guard, local or state police or security forces of any kind.

Around midday on Thursday, air boats operated by private volunteers began arriving and taking four or five persons at a time. The remaining hospital patients and staff – approximately 2000 people -- were evacuated by citizen volunteers.

“They made a LOT of trips, those boats,” he said.

The volunteers, however, could take the victims only so far because the water became too shallow for the boats. The hospital staff, along with volunteers, walked through the muddy water to the corner of Napoleon and St. Charles.

Quigley describes the shocking spectacle hundreds of mostly black survivors, gathered at this location, awaiting their next hope. A constant stream of people kept arriving, as though “up out of nowhere.” He describes an elderly man with a satchel and cane, and a man with a nine-day-old baby. People were milling about, having lost everything, in the rain, wet, cold, hungry and thirsty.

An old lawn company truck “maybe thirty years old with wooden slats,” pulled up and allowed roughly 100 people to board. The truck was an open flatbed, and it was still pouring rain.

Quigley sat beside a pregnant woman who had only thirty dollars and a bottle of antibiotics with her. She said she had been turned away from the Superdome twice.

“It was a scary ride,” he remarked. “We had to duck trees and power lines.”

When they got to the drop point, Bill said, “everyone gasped” because it was just an underpass at Interstate 10, where thousands of people were already waiting for buses. “It was pouring rain; there was mud, no portalets.”

Finally, Bill and his wife decided to give up trying to get on a bus, hoping instead to volunteer to help those in need of medical attention or simply just start walking toward Baton Rouge. They noticed several people with stethoscopes around their necks who turned out to be nurses, one of whom was about to drive to Lafayette, which happened to be near where Bill’s wife’s family resides.

Thus, the Quigleys managed to escape New Orleans Thursday night. They were among the last to be evacuated from Memorial Hospital, but there were thousands left behind at the drop point, waiting to be transported … somewhere. By the time the Quigley’s got out of New Orleans, Bill says the city had become a “Third World mass unit.”

He estimates that there were a quarter million people still in the city through Wednesday. By Thursday, he estimated “50,000, or maybe double that.” People from the poor neighborhoods didn’t want to go to the Superdome. They tried to stay home because, Bill said, they knew the Superdome was “dangerous and nasty.”