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Katrina disaster draws medical volunteers

Current, retired NUMC staff among those responding to call for help

When the awesome power of Hurricane Katrina and the devastation that it left behind was brought into the homes of people around the world through television, radio and newspaper, a stunned reaction was common. After the shock of the destruction subsided, people nationwide felt they had to do something big and something quickly.

As the request for health care providers went out, New Ulm Medical Center staff, past and present, sprang into action. Dr. Chris Miller, a family practice physician at the Medical Center, and retired Registered Nurses Marlys Zetah and Liz Green headed down to Louisiana for three weeks, along with a handful of other area residents. Medical personnel were in high demand due not only to the devastation the hurricane left behind, but because of the destruction of the infrastructure of the medical community. Many people with chronic health conditions who were left without medical care or access to their daily medications.

Sandy Radloff of the local Red Cross chapter arranged a flight and the New Ulm volunteers arrived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana about 10 days after Hurricane Katrina and were taken to an abandoned store that had been turned into Red Cross headquarters. 800 other volunteers arrived the same day, Zetah said.

“We were lucky, because we were medical personnel the Red Cross knew where they were going to assign us right away,” Zetah said. “Some of the other volunteers waited for hours at headquarters waiting to learn where they would go.”

The three were assigned to the civic center in Lake Charles, where 3,000 evacuees were housed. “We were seeing mostly older people with chronic diseases,” Miller explained. “People with diabetes and high blood pressure. We were treating 30 to 50 people a day,” which translated into about 12 hours of work a day.

“We provided care, but we also did a lot of visiting with people,” Zetah said. “People would tear up and cry when they heard how far we had come and that so many Minnesota towns were having food and clothing drives to help out.”

Zetah also pointed out that they made “wonderful friends, from all over the country. It was an adventure. I was anxious to go and I was very grateful for my nursing background so I could help out that way.”

After six days, Hurricane Rita started bearing down on the coast, and the entire civic center had to be evacuated. At this point, the trio of volunteers was split up. Miller was sent about 90 miles inland to Alexandria, Louisiana and Zetah and Green were sent about six hours north to Monroe, Louisiana.

In Alexandria, the evacuees had barely settled in when Hurricane Rita hit, Miller said. “By then it was only a category one or one-and-a-half,” he said. After witnessing street lights exploding during the storm, he said, “It was bad enough that I knew I didn’t want to be in a category four!”

Although many of the same routine checks of blood sugar and blood pressure were done at the second shelter as had been performed at the first shelter, there was at least one case that stood out in Miller’s recollection.

“One man came to the center with a history of heart problems. We sent him on to the hospital and he ended up getting angioplasty and having stents put in. He came back ten days later to let us know how he was doing,” Miller said. “For us that was just a fifteen minute check of this individual and then we sent him on his way. For him, it was a major event.”

Another part of the population that needed medical care was the mentally ill, especially those who had been unable to take necessary medications for days.

After Hurricane Rita went through, the power went out and then the water stopped flowing. Bathrooms were not usable and food began to run out the next day. But the people there seemed to take it in stride, Miller said. “Everyone was very well behaved and nice. Nothing like what you saw on the news,” he said. “Most of them are very spiritual people. I saw very little anger or bitterness at the fact that the hurricane had come through and taken everything that they owned.”

Zetah experienced the same at the shelter in Monroe. “I was just amazed at the resiliency of the human spirit. How they could rise above this tragedy and smile and say ‘Well, we’re still alive.’”

When she came home, Zetah had a hard time adjusting. “All I could think about were those people. Everything here seemed so superfluous. We had a home to come home to. Those people had nothing,” she said.

Miller, too, expressed feelings of guilt at returning home. “By then, the population in the evacuation center had thinned down to about half the people. Those were the people who probably didn’t have the resources to move on.”

Zetah and Miller had only the highest praise for the Red Cross in handling the disaster. “I think most people got taken care of and got taken care of well. I don’t know any organization that could have handled it any better,” Miller said. “The scope of this was so huge and most community infrastructures had been destroyed, so it tested every part of the emergency response systems.”

Zetah returned to help out at a shelter in Baton Rouge in November, where the population of the shelter had thinned down to about 45 people.

Both Zetah and Miller felt very fortunate to be able to help out. “I was especially lucky that my physician partners let me go right when we were in the middle of transitioning over to the automated medical record. It was not the most convenient time for them.”

“If there was another disaster, I would go in a minute,” Zetah said. “You almost feel like you need to go.”

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