...when Hesch stepped into the world of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans 11 days ago, he found unusual, unsettling things. First, the obvious: The catastrophic damage was incomparable to anything he'd seen before.
Hesch -- one of 35 people in a self-contained, federally funded team from New Mexico -- arrived in New Orleans at 3 a.m. Aug. 30 with 20 tons of supplies. Without a wink of sleep, the group set up treatment tents in the Louisiana Superdome, which was packed with tens of thousands of refugees.
But between 9 and 10 a.m., their plans were quickly altered. "We had people running through screaming that the levy just broke, and we had to evacuate," Hesch said in a telephone interview from Louisiana on Thursday.
Alone, the New Mexico team -- and one doctor from New Orleans -- set up a full-scale acute medical-care clinic by 11 a.m. in the basketball and hockey arena, which is connected to the Superdome by a causeway. The sick and injured from the Superdome came to them. Some had head injuries. Some had gunshot wounds. Some had cuts on their bodies from walking through the water-filled streets. Some had gone cold turkey off their medications.
In the space of 40 hours, the staff treated 800 to 1,000 patients. Hesch said he sutured wounds under the light of his headlamp....
In other disasters where Hesch has worked, people pulled tightly together as a community. But New Orleans didn't seem to know how to do that. "The Dome turned into a den of depravity at some point," he said,....
Hesch, luckily, met a few of what he calls "salt of the earth" people who kept him from losing faith in humankind. Two brothers who cleaned up the wreckage. A quadriplegic man in a wheelchair who took care of his cantankerous 84-year-old mother. A circle of people singing hymns.
"That was uplifting, but the rest of the time was like walking in a tiger's den," Hesch said.
In the midst of chaos, Hesch noticed a missing ingredient that could have helped. "Usually martial law is imposed so order is maintained," Hesch said. "Here, we did not have that."
The National Guardsmen deployed to New Orleans were young, inexperienced and not intimidating, he said. By contrast, at Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the 82nd Airborne Special Forces carried locked and loaded AK-47s at all times, with the National Guard in strong force, he said.
A former Air Force guy himself, Hesch and other ex-military members of the team planned to set up a defense perimeter and "fight to the end," if the situation grew dangerous.
That didn't happen.
By Aug. 31, the Federal Emergency Management Agency told the exhausted New Mexico team it was time to leave. "You guys are just incredible but you're pushing it way too far," Hesch recalls FEMA telling the crew.
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And now things are settling down, and volunteer doctors are not needed as much....LINK
Georgia Team Commander Judy Edwards had been told by FEMA officials to expect between 10,000 and 14,000 refugees at Reunion Arena that had not seen a doctor, nurse or pharmacist for days.
What she found on Sunday morning was about 300 evacuees at Reunion and about 4,000 evacuees at the nearby Convention Center.
And at the Convention Center, county officials, along with local hospitals, had set up a state-of-the-art medical facility with separate areas for pediatrics and emergency care.
"It was beautiful in there," said Mark Spradlin, who is in charge of logistics and planning for the Georgia team. "If they had shut down and we had moved in, the level of medical care would have gone down."
Ah, but does the press congratulate Texans for their sterling work in setting up medical care and for finding better places to house their refugees?
Nope...the headline of the article is: Bureaucratic mistakes frustrate Georgia Team
Can't praise Texas Can't praise Texas...
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