CNN: Marooned doctors plead ‘Please help us’
“Doctors at two desperately crippled hospitals in New Orleans called The Associated Press Thursday morning pleading for rescue, saying they were nearly out of food and power and had been forced to move patients to higher floors to escape looters.”
Sniper fire is preventing patient evacuations
“Charity Hospital has halted patient evacuations because it has come under sniper fire, according to Dr. Tyler Curiel, who witnessed the incident.”
Update:
Forbes.com: The Hospital Versus The Hurricane
Joe Guarisco has lived most of his 51 years in New Orleans. “It’s home,” he says. Now, amid what he says is the most devastating hurricane of his lifetime, Crisco has been doing his job as the head emergency-room physician at the Ochsner Clinic, one of only three hospitals left functioning in the storm-damaged city . . .
. . . During the storm, Guarisco kept a nurse and a doctor, as well as security guards and National Guardsmen at the door. Each day, he says, they turned away a hundred patients who were more in need of shelter than medical care, and admitted 75 who had real medical needs. With only a minimum of electricity generated by diesel generators to run monitors, ventilators and other medically necessary equipment, a skeleton crew has kept watch over the hospital.”
Update 2:
Isolated Hospital Called ‘Lethally Chaotic’
“At Tulane University Hospital and Clinic, armed ‘thugs’ gathered in the parking lot and entered the facility, probably in search of drugs, reported John Matessino, head of the Louisiana Hospital Association.
‘We’ve got a bad security situation here,’ he said. ‘There’s certainly a contingent of people who are addicted and they haven’t had a fix in a few days and they look at the hospital as a big pharmacy.'”
Looters target New Orleans hospital
“The hurricane-battered Children`s Hospital in New Orleans has come under siege by angry and desperate looters, the New Orleans Times Picayune reports.
Late Tuesday, Gov. Kathleen Blanco`s spokeswoman Denise Bottcher said the facility in the city`s north end was being targeted, and people in the hospital were in danger.
Bottcher said the director of the hospital fears for the safety of the staff and the 100 children inside the locked-down hospital. The director said police had been summoned, but due to rising floodwaters, neither they nor National Guard have been able to respond.”
