Hospitals facing a Category 4 storm typically either evacuate or discharge as many patients as possible. But this time, amid the community’s fourth, brutal surge of COVID, many of Chabert Medical Center's patients were too sick to be sent home.
A healthcare worker sits in a hurricane damaged emergency room at Leonard J. Chabert Medical Center in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, Friday, Sept. 3, 2021, in Houma, La. The emergency room had recently reopened after the hospital evacuated patients and had to close due to the hurricane. HOUMA, La. — The wind ripped chunks off the hospital’s roof and the entire building rumbled. One nurse said the cement pounding into the walls sounded like the loudest bowling alley she could imagine.
“The mental stress on our employees is much worse now than it’s ever been,” said Richard Zuschlag, the owner of Acadian Ambulance Service, the state’s largest emergency medical outfit. “COVID set us up for that. And the hurricane is the icing on the cake.” Dr. Chuck Burnell, the chief medical officer of Acadian Ambulance, was in the basement of Terrebonne General sorting out how to move more than 100 patients, many of them infected with COVID, some on ventilators.
“I cried for days just thinking about how we’re the last thing people see or talk to. We tell their family members, ‘Hey, they’re going to be all right’ to console them,” she said. “But then reality sets in that they weren’t all right. It wasn’t OK.” Intensive care units filled to capacity, with some hospitals creating overflow units to accommodate patients so sick they couldn’t survive without extraordinary medical intervention. To keep up, nurses and doctors pulled extra hours, filling in for colleagues who’d caught the virus or simply had enough.
In recent weeks, Semere has watched patients in their 20s and 30s go on ventilators and die. A few weeks ago, a man and his mother were admitted to the ICU at a neighboring hospital. They died within five hours of each other. Semere was on the phone with a nurse at that hospital, and could hear the man’s wife wailing through the receiver.
Often that burden falls on nurses when families can’t visit sick loved ones because of infection risk. But then she thought: Without water, there was no air conditioning, and it was pushing 100 degrees. Downed electrical lines were scattered outside, and if something caught fire, they wouldn’t be able to put it out. Peoples didn’t think she could keep her patients and staff safe.
Burnell, the ambulance company’s medical officer, coordinated the evacuation from the hospital’s basement. They had no radio communication and no cell reception. To tell each other anything, they had to run. Nurses, doctors, medics and administrators sprinted across floors wet and slippery from the rain and the sweat. They worked off printed papers to choreograph who would go where and when, to make sure patients positive for COVID didn’t cross with those who weren’t.
The staff watched from the windows as the top of a doctor’s SUV peeled away. Tiny twisters rose up out of the wind. Rappé reached down to feel her neck — still warm — and the team intubated her, started chest compressions and gave her IV medication and fluids. Rappé and her partners loaded the woman onto a stretcher and trudged through the mud toward the truck, parked a football field away. By the time they made it to a hospital 15 minutes later, the woman was dead.
Burnell has been tarping roofs of employees whose homes were flooded, tracking down medications and treating patients in the field. A man showed up with a severe dog bite to his face — an injury that would normally need stitches — and Burnell dressed it as best he could. He found two precious doses of antibiotics for an EMT whose children were suffering from ear infections so she could stay on the ambulance and work.
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