The Otter Side: Woah! Cool!
I spent 3 1/2 hours in an LAV (Light Armored Vehicle) driven by National Guard troops and manned by ATF agents. We had a list of 6 addresses from the 911 Center. Five were requests to "check welfare of occupant" and one was reported as "trapped." Five were clear--no one alive or dead at the address. At one, we rescued someone. I'm sorry, but I'm going to hold the story until I can upload my pictures of the event. To do this, we cruised for miles up and down streets filled above the tops of vehicles with black-green, fetid water. At Jeff Davis Parkway, the water became too deep for us to safely go further, so the search stopped there. There is a heck of a lot of inundated NOLA beyond that. Words cannot describe it well enough, but I promise there will be pictures later next week.
The mission would have taken far shorter, but we stopped multiple times to break open MRE's and bottled water for dogs and one cat trapped on their porch. We noted the addresses of many dogs and cats. The Humane Society is here with boats and will retrieve them when we give them the list. Interestingly, they have a command post at Harrah's, right there with the big boys.
Saw two floating bodies, the less description of them, the better.
It's late and I want to go to bed, so I'll just make a couple more observations, this time just about my own profession and how it is functioning here:
There are physicians and nurses here who are complaining about our vaccinating everybody for Hepatitis A. They keep quoting CDC studies that show that only the most heavily exposed personnel are at risk. I finally told one of them to shut up for a simple reason. No study has ever looked at the impact of filling a city of 500,000 with shit and corpses. This is an event unparalleled in the history of public health. I am tired of hearing about studies that can't begin to apply to a toxic event of this scale. Personally, I think everyone in the area should be vaccinated for Hepatitis A & B, and those with the most exposure should get the hyperimmune globulin (lay term, "gamma globulin"). My proof? None. My reason? Common damn sense.
Also, JCAHO, FDA, DEA, American Red Cross, etc. regulations cannot apply when the world turns upside down. Whether physician or nurse, state, federal, or volunteer, the most effective responders in this event have been those competent providers that do what is possible and necessary for the situation, not what the "Book" says they may do. Amazingly, there are some hide-bound fools out here that expect a team to vaccinate hundreds of people in a single day and maintain full documentation and not allow para-professionals (e.g., EMT's) to administer the injections. I had 3 patients today require intravenous hydration. They had a classic "swoon" after the vaccine shots, but they were so dehydrated, they didn't recover until they got some fluids. If we didn't have EMT's doing the shots "illegally," vaccinations would have ground to a halt while the docs and nurses were attending to these patients.
Rant over. Good night.
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