By A.J. Heightman, JEMS Editor-in-Chief
The situation in New Orleans is chillingly similar to the movie War of the Worlds. With limited communications with the outside world, limited transportation and no food or fresh water in many areas, stranded residents are shooting each other over bags of ice and trying to hijack ambulances as a means to escape the hellish conditions that exist in the disaster area.
With bodies lying out in the open and medical helicopters being fired on as they approach landing zones, New Orleans is a hazardous area for the men and women of EMS.
“This is a desperate SOS,” the mayor said in an MSNBC article which was published on Thursday. Although officials are attempting to regain control of the city with thousands of National Guardsmen being sent to the city, unruly mobs are reacting out of their instinct to survive and looting and accosting hospital staff, EMS units and reporters carrying water bottles.
According to MSNBC, reporters at the New Orleans Convention Center saw at least seven bodies scattered outside and witnessed hungry people breaking through the steel doors to a food service entrance and pushing out pallets of water and juice and whatever else they could find.
It’s a grim scene as EMS units are forced to protect themselves from the starved, distressed and angry crowd. Bodies are laying out in the open, with reports of an old man lying dead in a chaise lounge in a grassy median as babies cried around him, and a women lying dead in her wheelchair downtown, covered with a blanket, while another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
Streets above the floodwaters smell of urine and feces and are littered with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage.
Mosby textbook author Norman McSwain, MD, unable to gain resources from the New Orleans command center, sent an e-mail to the Associated Press pleading for assistance in the evacuation of two public hospitals (Charity and University Hospitals). McSwain, chief of trauma surgery at Charity Hospital, reported his facility was nearly out of food and power and forced to move patients to higher floors to escape looters. He is quoted in the MSNBC article as saying, “We have been trying to call the mayor’s office, we have been trying to call the governor’s office. ... We have tried to use any inside pressure we can. We are turning to you. Please help us.”
The New Orleans Superdome helicopter operation was suspended “until they gain control of the Superdome,” said Richard Zuschlag, head of Acadian Ambulance. Acadian is handling a major portion of the evacuation of sick and injured from New Orleans. He said the National Guard told him that it was sending 100 military police officers to gain control, but told them, “That’s not enough.”
Zuschlag said, “We need a thousand.”
Zuschlag reports that paramedics were calling him and crying for help because they were so scared of people with guns at the Superdome. After a medical helicopter was fired on near the Superdome early Thursday morning, medical helicopter transfers were temporarily suspended.
David LaCombe, director of the National EMS Academy based in Acadian’s headquarters in Lafayette, L.A., has spent the past few days triaging and treating thousands of displaced New Orleans residents desperate for medical care.
LaCombe reports countless patient deaths as a result of exacerbation of pre-existing medical conditions, heat exhaustion, lack of renal dialysis and congestive heart failure.
Medical officials at the Superdome found it necessary to relocate their treatment facilities multiple times because they were being overrun. LaCombe praised the Louisiana National Guard, which finally established a secure, guarded area for the treatment of the sick and injured.
On scene medical personnel report that what is being seen on televised news reports is just the tip of the disaster iceberg. This is equivalent to the impact of a tsunami striking America and its consequences will be felt for months, perhaps years, to come. JEMS will bring you further updates as this historic emergency medical event unfolds.