45 Bodies Are Found in a New Orleans Hospital

By KIRK JOHNSON
Published: September 13, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/national/nationalspecial/13storm.html (must register to the NY Times to view original article)

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 12 - The bodies of 45 people have been found in a flooded uptown hospital here, officials said Monday, sharply increasing the death toll from Hurricane Katrina and raising new questions about the breakdown of the evacuation system as the disaster unfolded.

Officials at the hospital, the Memorial Medical Center, said at least some of the victims died while waiting to be removed in the four days after the hurricane struck, with the electricity out and temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.

Steven L. Campanini, a spokesman for the hospital's owner, Tenet Healthcare, said the dead included patients who died awaiting evacuation as well as people who died before the hurricane struck and whose bodies were in the hospital morgue.

Mr. Campanini said the dead might have also included evacuees from other hospitals and the surrounding neighborhood who gathered at Memorial while waiting to evacuate the city.

Repercussions from the storm continued to echo in Washington, where the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael D. Brown, a walking symbol to many people here of government failure in the crisis, resigned. Mr. Brown was relieved of his role in the day-to-day disaster operations here on Friday. (Related Article)

President Bush, meanwhile, toured the ghostly streets of the city standing in the back of an open-air truck flanked by the mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana, who have been sharply critical of the federal performance.

In Baton Rouge, 1,000 people from the devastated St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, crowded the State Capitol and were told that memories of their community might be all they have left.

Flights were set to resume at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, and city officials said they were creating a new command center downtown at a closed hotel.

Mr. Bush's appearance with Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans and Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, both Democrats, suggested that at least some of the bitterness over the response to the disaster had lifted.

On Mr. Bush's most recent visit to the stricken area, on Sept. 5, Ms. Blanco learned that he was making the trip from news reports.

The president, in a brief question and answer session with reporters after his tour on Monday, said that government coordination in rebuilding the city and the region was paramount and that local vision should determine the direction of the reconstruction. "It's very important for the folks in New Orleans to understand that, at least as far as I'm concerned, this great city has got ample talent and ample genius to set the strategy and set the vision," Mr. Bush said after his 40-minute tour. "Our role at the federal government is, you know, obviously within the law, to help them realize that vision. And that's what I wanted to assure the mayor."

Mr. Bush also returned to accusations that racial discrimination was involved in government's response to the hurricane, saying "the storm didn't discriminate" and neither did the rescuers.

Mr. Nagin and Ms. Blanco have said federal delays in sending aid had compounded the damage of the storm and heightened the anarchy in the days after the storm, when tens of thousands of people were trapped for days at sites like the Convention Center and the Superdome without food or water.

Mr. Nagin said in a radio interview Monday, when asked about his meeting with the president, "If anything, he told me he kind of appreciated my frankness and my bluntness."

The news that 45 bodies had been found at Memorial was also a reminder of how much else, in the physical structure and in the human toll, might yet remain unknown.

On Monday, the authorities elevated the statewide death toll from Hurricane Katrina to 279; of those, 242 were from the New Orleans metropolitan region. In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour said the toll there was 218.

In Baton Rouge, there were more reminders of the thousands of people who may have no community to return to at all.

More than 1,000 displaced residents from St. Bernard Parish crowded the State Capitol to learn about the state of their devastated houses. No one has been permitted to re-enter the area to retrieve belongings or examine their houses. News of the meeting traveled by word of mouth and Web sites, and people lined up for blocks outside the Art Deco Capitol, where Gov. Huey P. Long was assassinated in 1935. Some drove from Houston.

Local officials did not try to hide the bad news.

"You will not recognize St. Bernard Parish," the parish president, Henry J. Rodriguez Jr., told hundreds of residents in the marble foyer of the Capitol. "All you will have left of St. Bernard Parish is your memories."

Mr. Bush also saw the devastation first-hand on his tour of New Orleans. His tour passed by smashed cars, tree branches and rubble.

For most of the ride, Ms. Blanco, Mr. Bush and Mr. Nagin stood in a military truck and had to duck under low wires and branches. At one point, Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard, who succeeded Mr. Brown last week as head of hurricane relief, removed his Coast Guard cap to shield Mr. Bush from a wire.

City officials said they had moved most of the makeshift emergency operations command center that they had set up at City Hall since the storm arrived across the street to a battered Hyatt hotel, where power has been restored and Mayor Nagin keeps a suite.

In Ballroom E on the third floor of the hotel, 100 computer stations were set up at pods of circular tables to handle 24-hour work by groups like the New Orleans police, 82nd Airborne Division of the Army, the Coast Guard, National Guard and public health officials.

Edward Minyard, a contractor with Unisys who is in charge of setting up the center, said the operation was very likely to grow to as many as 500 positions, meaning as many as 1,500 people working in shifts around the clock.

In Harrison County, Miss., in the Gulfport-Biloxi region, a list of 600 missing persons was distributed by the coroner's office, though authorities emphasized that the people on the list were not necessarily missing. The names are of people who have been sought by family members.

"We have rescued everybody that we think could possibly be rescued," said Joe Spraggins, the head of emergency management for the county.

Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport, which began running commercial flights at the end of last week, expects to return to its regular flight schedule in two weeks, Colonel Spraggins said.

Delta, Northwest and AirTran Airlines plan to begin operating limited schedules on Tuesday, he said. Northwest said it would resume scheduled commercial service to the New Orleans airport on Wednesday, with its first inbound flight in 10 days scheduled to arrive from Memphis at 10:44 a.m. Repairs began on Monday on the Twin Span Bridge on Interstate 10, connecting New Orleans and Slidell. Within 45 days, the eastbound span is to be repaired, providing one lane of traffic in each direction.

Reporting for this article was contributed bySewell Chan in Baton Rouge, La.; Michael Luo and William Yardley in New Orleans; and Campbell Robertson in Gulfport, Miss.