DIY Disaster Relief

By Andrew Gumbel, LA CityBeat. Posted October 20, 2005.

Don’t let anybody kid you. The government response to Hurricane Katrina was not only a disaster when the storm first hit. It’s still a disaster now.

I’ve been talking to medical professionals who have been to the Gulf Coast in the past couple of weeks, and this is what they have told me.

First, FEMA continues to be next to useless. It is not providing relief workers with the access they need to areas crying out for their help. It is not keeping up with bills for the emergency work it has authorized so far. A shockingly large number of doctors and nurses are being told that their services are not needed. Those with the guts and the initiative to go ahead regardless are finding that the exact opposite is true –- thousands upon thousands of storm evacuees who have run out of their prescription medications, or require new prescriptions, or need help with a panoply of storm-induced problems, from simple cuts and bruises to infections and depression and suicidal feelings.

Secondly, FEMA and the Red Cross are not talking to each other to sort it all out. At the Cajundome in Lafayette, Louisiana –- home to more than 5,000 evacuees –- there was, as of a few days ago, no formal on-site medical care. That meant people had the unenviable choice of going to the emergency room of a Lafayette hospital, waiting in line for hours and hoping for the best, or somehow fending for themselves.

Thirdly, the failures of the first six weeks or so since Katrina struck are likely only to compound the problems down the road. Sanitation in the shelters is a nightmare. Some professionals don’t exclude outbreaks of tuberculosis or other diseases one might have associated, pre-Katrina, with an earlier, more backward era.

Don’t take it from me. Here’s Paula Criscenzo, a Californian nurse, who recently traveled to the Gulf with her sister, an internist, and committed her impressions of the Cajundome to paper:

Any prescriptions that had been filled [when the evacuees first arrived] were now expired and needed to be filled. FEMA had still not paid anything to the pharmacies that had filled these prescriptions, so they were not filling or renewing any prescriptions. All of the evacuees from Rita who had arrived a week earlier had been told that they would not have their prescriptions renewed until the Katrina bills were paid by FEMA … These people were in a crisis situation. Many of them were on five to six different medications for heart, thyroid, and diabetes problems and had run out of meds at least a week ago.

In addition to the health issues there is a huge population there that is addicted to pain killers and other narcotics that are now going through withdrawal. There was nothing set up for these people except a clinic they could be bused to that was only open on Mondays and Thursdays … All of these people should have been receiving counseling as they had been through trauma too unspeakable to believe.

Another medical professional stunned by the organizational chaos he found is Graham Waring, a Santa Monica-based internist who also happens to be Arnold Schwarzenegger’s personal physician. He had spoken to senior FEMA personnel before leaving for Baton Rouge. When he and a team of six other doctors and nurses arrived, however, they were told they weren’t needed. When they asked if they could at least register to practice in the disaster region, they were told: “To be quite frank, we don’t really need physicians here. We have an overabundance of them. The media has blown it out of proportion.”

Dr. Waring’s group eventually ran into a religious charity that not only provided them with the credentials FEMA was refusing to hand out but said they were actually praying for a group of doctors to show up. For a week, he and his colleagues toured many of the outlying areas not highlighted in the television and newspaper coverage and worked their hearts out. They came across untreated abscesses, patients with dangerously high blood pressure, multiple cases of dehydration, upper respiratory infections –- spread, no doubt, by the constant coughing in many shelters –- and case after case of psychological trauma.

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