For the first time, United States President George Bush on Tuesday explicitly took responsibility for shortcomings in the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Speaking at a press conference at the White House, Bush said that it had ”exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government”.
”And to the extent the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility,” Bush said. ”I want to know what went wrong or what went right … It’s in our national interest that we find out exactly what went on so we can better respond. I’m not going to defend the process going in but I am going to defend the people on the ground saving lives.”
The discovery of the bodies of at least 44 people inside a flooded New Orleans hospital has raised new questions about evacuation procedures in the wake of the storm. Postmortem examinations are to be carried out on the bodies. It was not clear on Tuesday how many had died before the hurricane struck, but hospital staff described in harrowing detail attempts to keep already weakened patients alive in the 38C heat as they waited up to four days for rescue.
Local and state officials have repeatedly blamed the Bush administration for failing to react quickly enough to the unfolding catastrophe, leaving tens of thousands of people trapped in the city for days.
There was some confusion over the number of corpses. Bob Johannesen, a spokesperson for the state department of health and hospitals, said 45 patients had been found on Sunday inside the 317-bed Memorial Medical Centre in the uptown district of the city; hospital assistant administrator David Goodson said there were 44, plus three in the grounds.
Jeffrey Kochan, a Philadelphia radiologist volunteering in New Orleans, said the team that recovered the bodies told him they found 36 corpses floating on the first floor. ”These guys were just venting. They need to talk,” he told the Associated Press. ”They’re seeing things no human being should have to see.”
The water had mostly disappeared from around the hospital on Tuesday except for a few puddles of toxic-looking brown liquid that gathered in small hollows. But it was a very different scene after Katrina struck. After the levees broke, the floodwaters that engulfed the hospital seeped into the generators and the power went out. The heat began to rise, and, according to a nurse interviewed by the New York Times, the doctors and nurses resorted to fanning the patients in a vain attempt to keep them cool.
”When you’re already ill and debilitated, dehydration and the extreme heat in there, that certainly was a factor,” Sharen Carriere (47) told the newspaper. ”These were sick people.”
Relatives and nurses were ”literally standing over the patients, fanning them”, Goodson told the Associated Press. ”These patients were not abandoned.”
The hospital’s windows were wide open on Tuesday, almost as if the building was gasping for air. National Guardsmen from Santa Monica were patrolling the grounds and stopping people going inside. Piles of hospital rubbish bags littered the ramp into the ambulance bay.
Steven Campanini, a spokesperson for the owner of the hospital, Tenet Healthcare Corporation, said some of the patients had died before Katrina arrived, and none of the deaths resulted from lack of food, water or electricity to power medical equipment. The dead may also have included evacuees from other hospitals and the surrounding area who had gathered at Memorial believing it would be safe.
Frank Minyard, the Orleans Parish coroner, told NBC that the evacuation of the city was successful, considering that the death toll so far was much lower than expected. But he warned: ”There just may be a lot of people who are still down in those deep waters … My biggest fear is that we will find something down there that is way out of proportion. Hopefully, it doesn’t happen, but we worry.”
The hospital discovery raised Louisiana’s official death toll to nearly 280.
In Washington the acting director of the federal emergency management agency pledged on Tuesday to intensify efforts to find more permanent housing for the tens of thousands of survivors. ”We’re going to get people out of the shelters, we’re going to move on and get them the help they need,” David Paulison said in his first public comments since taking over from Michael Brown, who resigned on Monday. – Guardian Unlimited Â