45 Bodies Found at New Orleans Hospital

Times-Picayune

Despite horrendous, desperate conditions, hospital staff struggled to
afford the dead any shred of dignity available, moving at least a
dozen into a chapel and covering each with a blanket or placing them
in body bags.

“Everything was done to protect the remains,” Hackney said, adding
that security workers remained at the hospital until Thursday or
Friday of last week to protect bodies that were scattered all over the
hospital, some who had been brought to the top floors in hopes they
could be rescued by helicopter.

Mary Carstens, a New Orleans resident who evacuated to the hospital
with her husband, a computer systems contractor there, described
“heroic” efforts by staff to keep patients alive.

“Nurses stayed up all night, literally, fanning patients with paper or
pieces of cardboard just to keep them cool. There were older people
lying on the floor on mattresses or right on the floor. Others were
manually giving them oxygen for hours at a time,” she said, describing
the resuscitation bags that were used.

Generators stopped working Tuesday, leaving the building
completely without electricity, darkening the already hot and humid
hospital until it was almost unbearable to be inside, she said.

But of course, how could anybody have foreseen this? Says the Bush Administration with a straight face. Maybe they should have read their own documents from 2004:

“Hospitals would be overcrowded with special-needs patients. Backup generators would run out of fuel or fail before patients could be moved elsewhere.”