Hurrican Katrina

Sept. 19, 2005

A recent article in the Associated Press entitled New Orleans Health Care System Destroyed brought issues about Hurricane Katrina to my attention that I had not realized. This article made me realize that I can not fathom how large of a tragedy Katrina was because even though my thoughts have been so tightly wrapped around the flooding, death, and destruction. I did not even think about an enormous problem that falls into one of my so called groups of though; being destruction.

The problem that I am referring to is the destruction of all or the majority of the hospitals in New Orleans. As stated in the article "This city's health care facilities have been shattered to an extent unmatched in U.S. history." This problem in any city at any time would be devastating, let alone in a city that just experienced one of the worst hurricanes ever to hit North America. "Essentially the health care infrastructure of New Orleans is gone -- it no longer exists," said Joe Cappiello, Vice President of the national hospital accreditation organization.

Just as there are many different types of destruction caused by the hurricane, there are many different dangers caused by the destruction of the hospitals. For one, there were an abundance of diseases caused by the flooding. This is a problem because the hospitals may be surrounded by disease and there is an urgency to open the hospitals as soon as people start moving back in. As said by Cappiello "The federal government needs to go in there and make sure the hospitals are a safe environment before they're reopened."

Many things came to mind as I was reading this article, but one that I was surprised to read about was the lockdown procedure. Some hospital officials were scared that looting would take place, so they ordered their hospitals to lockdown all pharmaceutical supplies. Yes, this could have been a smart idea to protect the supplies from getting stolen, but what about the patients that needed them? There were several accounts of ailing patients in need of supplies. This all occurred because the massive flooding threw off the evacuation plans. Among other things, New Orleans was not prepared for how