I read this book just recently even though it was originally published in 2013, which was about 8 years after the hurricane. The book details what occurred in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at a specific New Orleans hospital, whch was then known as Memorial Medical Center. Although I’d obviously been aware of the vey broad strokes regarding the hurricane, it actually was not something I’d read up on in that much detail.* At the time it occurred, I was still in elementary school so I just have the vaguest memories of probably seeing news about it on TV, probably Brian William’s NBC program as that’s the nightly news show we used to watch back then. Living far away from the Gulf Coast, this wasn’t a formative memory for me in the firsthand sense, but the news coverage of hurricanes in the mid-2000s must have made an impression on child me in that I began to have the vague wish for something “interesting” to happen, like a hurricane.
*okay, well, I did read Anderson Cooper’s memoir in which he describes his experience reporting on Hurricane Katrina. That was just a portion of the book though, and he also described other events in his life.
So there is a strange sense of nostalgia here about the concept of delving into information about something I was vaguely aware of at the time and able to remember simplistically, but too young to fully grasp the scale and gravity of the situation. Unlike my reading about 9/11, which was more as if reading about a historical event that I had no conscious memory of at all, being less than 5 years old at the time.
This book is specifically about what happened at the hospital during five days after the hurricane and the investigation into the incident afterwards. The city had flooded and the beleaguered hospital could not evacuate all of its ailing patients in a timely, efficient manner. Some of the most severely ill patients that had not been evacuated were purportedly euthanized. This book does not provide a broader picture about Katrina’s impact on New Orleans overall, though there are probably other books that do.
I personally found this book very well-written and riveting. The structure of the information was straightforward to follow and not confusing. The events were described chronologically, beat by beat. Although there are many different people whose actions are described in the book, the author is precise in keeping them all differentiated, often mentioning a person’s job title upon subsequent references to remind the reader of that person's role in the events.
Tangentially, in contrast, I found the elongated muskrat biography from the other year to be very haphazardly structured, jumping around a lot chronologically. There were also way too many different people’s names that were impossible to fully keep track of because people’s job titles were typically only mentioned at the introduction of a given person. Upon subsequent references, I just had to try and vaguely remember who was who outside of a few main, more prominent and memorable people (Grimes, the Muskrat family, the ex-wives, the Neuralink employee he also had kids with).
It is very detailed and thorough, painting a vivid picture of the events it describes. A few of the reader reviews I read complained that there were too many superfluous details included, like what various people were wearing at a given time, but I didn’t mind that level of detail. Every piece of information had its place and seemed salient. I myself am a very detail-oriented person, so I can appreciate painstaking levels of detail where others might find it overwrought. I repeatedly referred to maps of the city to observe where specific locations mentioned in the book were. The hospital itself was repaired, reopened and remains in the same location today. A Walgreens mentioned as being across the street also appears to remain.
This book was written by a journalist and in general I find them to be good at writing nonfiction books, as it’s essentially an extemely longer-form sort of news article. The events described in the book obviously raise various ethical questions, which are interesting to contemplate. Who should be prioritized in a disaster situation with a shortage of resources? Is it right for a doctor to decide they should end a patient’s suffering in that kind of situation? I found the book very thought-provoking; it’s interesting to try and think about what I myself might do if I were in the position of the doctors and nurses at the hospital.
One of the things the book did not contain was photographs, except for a couple at the very beginning showing the hospital building amidst the flooding. I read an e-book edition, so maybe there was a photo insert in the print edition? I wanted to be able to better visualize some of the settings and scenes depicted in the book, so I looked up some press photos via Getty Images and the Associated Press. The first images of scenes at the hospital from the AP were taken on Wednesday afternoon (day four in the book). I assume it must’ve taken until then for photojournalists to be able to make it to this particular location to take these photos. There are a few photos depicting the scene outside the hospital on that Wednesday afternoon as some people were being evacuated in boats. As described in the book, people waited on the emergency room ambulance ramp to board boats that would take them away from the hospital to dry ground. In one of the photos, a man in green scrubs stands on the side of the ramp among a crowd of others. He is not named in the photo’s caption, but I wonder if he was one of the doctors mentioned in the book, and if so, which one. Cross-referencing with chapter 6 which describes Wednesday afternoon and the ramp scene, the man in the photo may have been doctor Ewing Cook who was at the ramp then, but I can't be completely sure. In the book, he is described as being retired, so presumably older, and the man in the photo looks older. He is also described as wearing a watch, which the man in the photo does.
A year or so after the hurricane, the hospital was sold by the company that had owned it and was renamed to its current name, Ochsner Baptist (originally, it had been called Southern Baptist Hospital). The hospital is visible on Streetview. What is (tangentially) kind of interesting to me is the architecture of the building, which has had various extensions and additions built onto it over the years. However, (part of?) the original 1926 building appears to remain, which is built in an old-fashioned brick style. Since local hospitals around here have all been built more recently, it’s a little unusual to me to see a hospital building in the style of the early 20th century. My mental image of hospitals is either a midcentury-ish-looking building or possibly something newer in a very generic 21st (or late 20th) century institutional building style. The architecture of Baptist hospital reminds me of the old dormitory buildings at the state university or older apartment buildings.
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