On 28 August 2005 — Sheri Fink’s Day One — Hurricane Katrina reached New Orleans. The National Weather Service warned that ‘human suffering will be incrdible by modern standards’. Fink’s enormous book chronicles that suffering as experienced inside the Memorial Medical Centre, one of the city’s biggest hospitals. Traditionally, staff had sheltered from hurricanes in Memorial,
bringing along kids, parents and grand-parents, dogs, cats and rabbits, and coolers and grocery bags packed with party chips, cheese dip and muffulettos.
(With this book it helps if you can read American fluently.)
About 2,000 people, sick and well, awaited rescue. On Day Four floodwater entered the lower floors; the back-up generators, shortsightedly housed in the basement, failed. Memorial was without power. The machines that supported the critically ill were now useless. Without air-conditioning, the temperature reached 43 degrees, but at first no one dared break a window in case they were sued for damaging hospital property.
Lavatories overflowed; immobile patients sweltered in their excrement.
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