Originally posted 10.08.2005

Excerpt from an interview with an orthopedic trauma surgeon who worked on a mobile hospital unit treating victims of the hurricanes.

“This is my read on things: if you’re a law abiding citizen and you need to work within the confines of established rules, you shouldn’t be there the first two weeks, because there are no rules. There’s no electricity, there’s no food, there’s no water, there’re no showers. In the first wave of deployment you need to pick up the people who can work problems, who can come up with innovative ways to solve problems and get things done, and I think that we had a lot of those people in the first two weeks. I was amazed by the innovation.

“The first night we were staying at the hospital, there was no light. We were in a Kmart parking lot and there were dead bodies on the Kmart roof and there were dead bodies inside the strip mall buildings. There’d been a 35-foot tidal surge where we were, so everything was under water. So one of our paramedics combined with one of these local evacuees who was living in a tent in the parking lot to recognize that we had generators, and there were these light poles that never did go under water, because they were high enough, but they just weren’t working because there was no city electricity. So they opened up the light poles, disconnected the power lines that weren’t working and connected the generators and turned them on. Then we had the only area in Waveland that had light, and that was within three hours. So we could then work at night at the hospital. And that was just somebody thinking smart and out of the box that allowed that to happen. We probably violated all kinds of rules, but who cares.”