An Interview with Edward Dees

This interview was conducted on November 7, 2007, at the physician's home in New Orleans, Louisiana.

ROWELL: You practice medicine/psychiatry here in New Orleans. Were you here during Hurricane Katrina? I don't know whether you stayed here when the hurricane and flooding came or whether you returned shortly after it came. I don't know, in other words, what you witnessed. What most of all attracted your attention during your time here or away?

DEES: All those things?

ROWELL: You might want to start with experiences that somehow relate to the work you do. Then too there is the personal. You might want to start there.

DEES: Okay. Well, let's start with something that ties it all together. I was on staff at one of the hospitals here in town—in fact, the only hospital that did not flood, Touro Infirmary—in the Emergency Department, and I was scheduled to be a part of the recovery team, which is the team that comes in after a storm. The people who were there during the storm did not expect it was going to be anything like Katrina, of course. Just standard disaster preparations.

So, the storm comes through Monday; I'm scheduled to go to work Wednesday; I wake up Wednesday and the water outside my house is up to my chest and they're pulling rafts and improvised rafts with people down the avenue in front of my house. The first thought was—or what came to my mind was—"If it's flooding here, there's nothing to do; there's no hospital to get to because it's got to be flooded as well." But in fact, the flooding came up only to St. Charles Avenue, which was six blocks from my house. On the other side of the avenue it was dry. And the hospital, as we found from the people coming back down the street, was on the side of the avenue that was dry. I packed my white coat into my knapsack, carried it over my head, walked those blocks, through water which was full of debris, down to the street and on to the hospital.

They were already in full evacuation when I arrived. There's no way that I would have known this; cell networks had become overloaded. I was there to assist in the evacuation of the last couple units in the hospital. Most emergency units are on the first floor of the hospital and there's a few times when you're called to go above the first floor, and usually for specific reasons: the cafeteria, medical staff meetings, a specific department meeting or rare patient encounter. It is rather infrequent that, as the emergency department physician, you spend time making your way through other parts of the hospital. I arrived and there were no lights; they had nothing with air or electricity or water; they were in full evacuation-mode. It was strange trying to navigate and I needed somebody to be with me, because I didn't know—I had lost all orientation as to where I was in the building. There were no lights and you needed a flashlight to see where you were.

I think it was the sixth floor—sixth or seventh floor—and it was a unit with patients who were the walking ill, if they could walk—they were not intubated; they were not seriously ill, but they were in the hospital. In fact, it was an uncommon practice in those pre-Katrina days to have patients from the community and nursing homes who did not absolutely require hospitalization to be "boarded" when storms approached. There was one woman, an elderly black woman, who was an amputee—lost one of her legs. As I recall, it was diabetes that led to her having this peripheral vascular disease. There was a resident and I. It was time to evacuate this unit and to do so orderly.

So I joined this team that had been doing this for hours—they'd been doing it all day—and followed his lead to...