Project Katrina

News stories like this are just hard to comprehend. Before you read the below quote ponder these stats for a few moments please. Before Katrina hit New Orleans there were 16 acute-care hospitals. Now there are nine. There were about 63 nursing homes pre-Katrina and today, there are 34. Ninety clinics used to provide safety-net care, now there are 19. And the only Level 1 trauma center is in Shreveport, some 350 miles away.

Peter DeBlieux always pictured himself working in a tent one day. It
just "wasn’t in this country." A veteran emergency-room physician,
DeBlieux is inside a tent pitched in an abandoned Lord & Taylor
store just a few blocks from where he once ran one of the busiest ERs
in the United States. That would be New Orleans’s Charity Hospital,
but, thanks to Hurricane Katrina, DeBlieux can’t go back there. The
flood that followed Katrina knocked out Charity’s electricity and
water. Patients and staff spent five grueling days trapped in the
hospital in 100-degree heat, rationing drinking water, and
hand-squeezing "ambu" bags to keep ventilator patients alive.

That was the easy part, some now say. Seven months later, New
Orleans’s healthcare system is floundering, and the fact that the
city’s once biggest hospital exists in a 30-bed tent is just one of the
most obvious symptoms. When Charity started offering emergency care in
a military tent on the convention center parking lot last September,
DeBlieux thought he’d be practicing medicine this way for a month,
tops. "Seven months out? It’s not OK," he says. "This is the United
States of America. This is not a Third World country."

It makes me ask, so we live in a third world country? Where is our government? Where is the Red Cross. Where is international help?