At Nursing Home, Katrina Dealt Only the First Blow

Irvin Boudreaux lived outside of Atlanta. In 35 hours, he would manage what no government agency or rescue team could pull off.

Rescue

With his brother and a friend, Boudreaux arrived at the chaotic perimeter of the city Thursday morning, towing a boat and a load of supplies. They were stopped at a checkpoint where only official vehicles could pass. His brother flashed his badge from his job with the sewage and water board. They claimed they were going in to check on sewer lines.

When Boudreaux got to the nursing home, he saw his sister first, and then his mother, sitting on a bucket in the driveway.

He simply could not believe their stories that no one would stop to help. He unhitched his boat and drove off in search of a police officer, a paramedic, anyone, but he saw for himself the futility of the mission. He returned to Lafon, where he took in the gruesome sight. By now, nearly a dozen patients were dead. The heat was stifling, but the smell was worse.

Boudreaux loaded his truck with the children who'd been trapped at Lafon, and his own mother, stepfather and grandmother. He crossed back through a checkpoint and found a state police officer, but the officer refused to take the group. Boudreaux then drove to the Superdome to see if he could use it as a staging area to drop off Lafon patients, but there was too much water to cross, and where it was dry he could see thousands of disoriented wanderers. The old people would never survive this scene. He turned back for Lafon.

The problem was transportation. Boudreaux called his employer, Marathon Oil Corp., and anyone else he could think of. Church buses were being commandeered from other states, but finding a driver who would brave the pandemonium of New Orleans was proving impossible.

By now the emergency operations center in Baton Rouge was aware there was a crisis. Jelynne Burley, a San Antonio woman whose grandmother was at Lafon, called a friend who worked in the Louisiana governor's office. The Nursing Home Association, a trade group that was keeping track of its 53 member nursing homes during the storm, was camped inside the emergency operations command in Baton Rouge. Lafon didn't belong to the organization, but Executive Director Joe Donchess said his employees "told many people many times that we had 50 patients, 70 patients or 100 patients and we needed help immediately. And we were left to figure it out ourselves."

Boudreaux would be their best shot. He found a bus company and a driver for $1,000. Leaving nothing to chance, he found three vans in Lafayette, too. The nursing home group scrambled to find a place to bring the evacuees, but even in the emergency operation center, simple communication was difficult.

When Boudreaux escorted the bus into the parking lot of Lafon, darkness had fallen. Inside the nursing home, flashlights were used as people gathered the patients. Those who were able, walked, such as Evelyn Leal, but her husband and others had to be carried out. Some were laid in the aisle of the bus on pillows. Boudreaux noticed how they "perked right up" in the air-conditioned bus. One patient did not make it; he died before he was loaded. He was the man with palsy, whose face Evelyn Leal had washed every day.

With more than 40 on board, the others would have to wait for the second run. McDaniel, her habit off and wearing a sweat-soaked T-shirt, stayed behind with them.

Ninety minutes later, the bus arrived at Chateau Terrebonne nursing home in the town of Houma, southwest of New Orleans. The staff was waiting. One man had raced to Chateau Terrebonne when he heard that buses were on their way. He saw Greenwood and asked if his father was on this bus or coming on the next.

The man's father was the person who died just before being loaded. "Your father did not survive this ordeal," Greenwood said, and the son grabbed her and held her and cried.

It was after midnight when the charter bus set out for Lafon for the second batch of patients, with Boudreaux in his truck leading the way.

They reached the Mississippi River bridge when the sky boomed with explosions, sonic and bright -- one person who saw it thought it was from a refinery, but that could not be confirmed. Boudreaux said a policeman told him to run for his life. They turned the vehicles around and parked on the shoulder of the road. After a couple of hours, the police opened the roads again.

But the bus driver was too afraid to venture forth. He told Boudreaux he wouldn't make the second run to Lafon.

The sun was coming up. It was Friday. Boudreaux sat on the side of the road. "I was just thinking about them people," he would later say.

He would get a second bus, but it wouldn't arrive until late that afternoon.

The Cavalry

On Friday, Dan Martinez and Jim Chesnutt were riding down Chef Menteur Highway when they noticed a dazed man in a hospital orderly's shirt standing under a tree. The two FEMA officials had orders not to stop for anyone without an armed escort, but they pulled over and asked the man if he needed help.

"Don't worry about me," he said, pointing to Lafon behind him. "There's people back there in worse shape."

Lafon wasn't on the list of nursing facilities and hospitals that rescue teams in this part of east New Orleans were searching. Even odder, the parking lot was dry and full of cars. Chesnutt and Martinez decided to take a look.

McDaniel greeted them at the door, and in urgent efficiency she described the gruesome tableau at Lafon: 12 dead bodies were in the chapel, two more dead were upstairs, and there were 59 others who needed immediate evacuation.

Chesnutt bolted up the stairs and took in the landscape of the elderly, lying on mattresses pads, slumped in wheelchairs, everywhere. Some wearily looked up at him. Most did not.

Martinez radioed for help. Ken Wilson was directing medical operations for the area from a nearby highway overpass when he heard the sobering radio call. An emergency medical physician and medical director for the Orange County, Calif., fire department, Wilson knew they had to get the patients out of there, but he had only three ambulances and he knew that was not enough. There were helicopters in the air, but radio communication with the state authorities was out.

He got an ambulance driver to call his dispatcher in Lafayette, who called someone at the Superdome, who was sitting beside a military liaison with communications to the Air National Guard and Army. Twenty minutes later, the first Black Hawk was fluttering toward Lafon, and soon, an armada filled the sky.

David Shatz, a trauma surgeon with the Miami search and rescue team, looked in the back of the green van parked to the left of the entrance. Two patients were lying on blue foam mattresses in the van. Someone said they had been moved down there because it was cooler than upstairs. Shatz could see one of them was comatose and on the verge of death.

Shatz walked upstairs. Triage, from the French word "to sift," meant making decisions about who was likely to live and die, and Shatz figured there were more to be made. To his surprise, the nuns had largely done the sorting for him. The first patients at the top of the stairs were the fittest. Walking down the hall, he found they seemed progressively weaker. Three or four at the end, he thought to himself, "were clearly on the way out."

At the nursing home parking lot, rescue workers jammed the stalled cars into neutral and pushed them out of the way to make room for the choppers.

A few patients were carried out on hard plastic stretchers, but most grabbed sheets and bedding for a makeshift sling. "Don't drop me," one patient said. Carmelite Cogan, 91, was naked except for a diaper. She later told her daughter that she crossed her arms over her chest for dignity.

One by one, they were brought out to wait for what was now a stream of Black Hawks that took most of the patients to the makeshift hospital at Louis Armstrong International Airport. McDaniel and her staff would not leave until the last patient was taken. One FEMA official told McDaniel she had done a "heroic job."

At the airport, some of the Lafon patients waited for as long as 15 hours before being flown to nursing homes and hospitals around the country. Many waited on stretchers on the dirty floor. Who would ever know their histories. Among them was 100-year-old Rosalie Daste, who suffered from dementia. No one at the airport would know that she had never missed a Southern University football game, that she was famous for her shrimp and okra, and that she made her grandchildren pick up pecans in the hot Louisiana sun because she wanted them to know what life would be like without a college education.

Two days after being airlifted from the New Orleans airport to a hospital in Monroe, La., Rosalie Daste died.

Aftermath

Family members were on their own to locate their loved ones. Many say they made repeated attempts to call McDaniel or her mother superior, Sister Sylvia Thibodeaux, in the days after the evacuation.

The more than 65 nuns evacuated before the storm had fled to a religious retreat center in Alexandria, 190 miles northwest of New Orleans. In an interview, Thibodeaux said she customarily evacuates the nuns in the face of severe hurricanes. She refused to say why Lafon didn't make the same choice.

"They made their own plans," Thibodeaux said. "I assign the sisters, but I do not make the decisions."

Lafon is now an archaeological site of everything that happened there: metal bed frames pushed against walls, the brown watermark, mattresses on the floor, strewn water bottles and stinking carpet.

Flies buzzed on the screen door of the chapel -- with the sign that said "morgue" after 22 bodies were recovered.

But one day last week there was remarkable order, too. The water had stopped short of the desktops, where paperwork remained neatly in place. Pencils still in their holders. Coffee cups half-full. A sweater draped over the back of a chair. The good and careful order of lives interrupted. Patient Alma Koehl still had a stuffed tiger on her bed. Patient Hilda DeMouy's room had a note reminding nurses to take her blood pressure from the right side.

In Sister Benjamin's room, a yellow ribbon from her jubilee party celebrating 50 years of religious life. On a counter in a nurse's room, an open Bible next to a copy of the Times-Picayune with the screaming headline, "Katrina Takes Aim."

Staff writers Jacqueline L. Salmon in Houma, La., and Lisa Rein in Houston and research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.