OPINION
DOCTORS Lounge
( continued from page 31) the many legacies of Katrina, which hurt so many of the poorest parts of New Orleans, is the ruin of houses made uninhabitable by black mold. Yet, people still live in some of them, having nowhere else to go.
The mold Stachybotrys Chartarum causes allergic respiratory illness with wheezing, asthma, coughing and recurrent infection, and it triggers nausea and migraines. Some have claimed it is implicated in the deaths of four university professors who worked for years in classrooms with spore counts that were deemed acceptable by the university, but unacceptable by outside consultants. It has been deemed the cause of“ sick building syndrome” and as such, has resulted in condemnation of public buildings.
What happens with this plague of hurricanes rings true to anyone whose home has ever flooded. I read accounts of our Great Flood of 1937, and the survivors sounded the same notes of despair and thankfulness, in the same sentence. In early January of 1937, it began to rain up and down the Mississippi and Ohio valleys. It rained and rained and rained, and three weeks later the flood gauge in Cincinnati got to 80 feet, its highest ever, and here, to 57 feet. More than 60 percent of Louisville was under water, and the power failed on January 24, not to be fully restored until Feb 12. The Chicago Tribune of Jan 28 th quoted Louisville Mayor Neville Miller, who said the death toll stood at about 200, but that the coroner estimated up to 400, since the men in boats were still saving the living, and leaving the dead where they were. Bodies they did load into boats were being incinerated to avoid disease. One rescued lady from Jeffersonville said,“ We were transported out of there like cattle, but we were satisfied.”
The University of Notre Dame sent a plane full of hip waders. Fish were being caught in the lobby of the Brown Hotel. The Tribune ran this item as well:“ Looters, tippers, rum pots or just the destitute and thirsty? Two liquor stores have been raided.”
Eventually, the fire department mechanic Jake Britt proposed that a pontoon bridge be built between downtown and the Highlands, the closest dry land. Capt. William S. Arrasmith, an architect who served in the Army Reserve, supervised 300 men who laid planks over hundreds of empty bourbon barrels. They were held together with cable secured to telephone poles. Boats from all over ferried the sick, exhausted, wet and hungry citizens to safety at last. City Health Commissioner H. R. Leavell told the Tribune that“ We have inoculated between 75,000 and 100,000 people against typhoid, and with all the volunteer nurses and doctors, we are well set up.”
In Katrina, the hospitals of New Orleans were basically killed off, one by one. For Harvey, it was a different kind of flood, and a different medical story.
The medical community of Houston cheered collectively last week, since all of its planning had helped. Sixteen years ago, Tropical Storm Allison had closed major hospitals with flooding in all the tunnels that so conveniently connected them. Operating rooms, pharmacies, central supply and ERs were inundated. The hospitals responded by setting aside their competitive urges long enough to enforce a plan of mandatory catastrophe planning, with shared resources, reporting to a central emergency center three times a day. They updated and reviewed these plans every year. They put in submarine doors in the tunnels so the flooding could be compartmentalized. They designed and redesigned their evacuation plans, with special attention to which hospital should retain which types of patients, matching diagnoses to clinical expertise. And, with Harvey, their plans worked. There were no large scale evacuations and Ben Taub Hospital, the trauma center, was closed to ambulances and ran out of food for a day, but by and large, the team building had paid off.
I hope that our hospital leaders, if ever the hurricanes reach us in all their fury, will be able to say the same thing.
Dr. Barry practices Internal Medicine with Norton Community Medical Associates-Barret. She is a clinical associate professor at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, Department of Medicine.
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