HELENA, Mont. — A college student stuck in a flooded New Orleans
hospital described desperate conditions in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina, telling his father of dozens of dead patients and describing a
makeshift morgue in an operating room.
Erik McCall, 23, spoke with his father for the first time late Thursday
from Methodist Hospital, where he and his mother have been since she was
called in to work there last weekend as a nursing administrator.
What attorney Terry McCall heard from his son was heart-wrenching.
McCall provided a recording of the phone call to The Associated Press on
Friday.
His son, a University of New Orleans student recovering from appendix
surgery, told him patients were just starting to be evacuated by
helicopter Thursday night. At least 40 had died since the hurricane made
landfall, and food and water were scarce.
"We're just dying of dehydration and exhaustion," Erik McCall told his
father by cell phone. "There's not much else to do and, you know, we're
working our asses off. I'm working on about six hours of sleep over the
past three days."
The younger McCall said corpses had been stacked in a second-floor
operating room, and patients on ventilators were being kept alive during
power outages by people taking turns squeezing manual breathing devices.
The first days after water from Lake Ponchartrain flooded the hospital's
first floor, Erik McCall said he feared they wouldn't be rescued because
they had no contact with anyone.
Communications have improved, yet McCall still expressed frustration
with delayed rescue efforts and accused Federal Emergency Management
Agency personnel of confiscating needed hospital helicopters and
ambulances for rescues elsewhere.
Reports of hospital looting for narcotics and other lawlessness were
rampant, he said.
"I've been in high spirits up until about (Thursday). ... I just can't
understand what's going on here," Erik McCall told his father. "Domestic
support is negligible at this point."
Terry McCall, a former New Orleans resident and U.S. Coast Guard member,
said the death and destruction there "makes me sad and makes me angry at
the same time," especially if some of it could have been prevented.
"Finding out that there are all those people there that died under those
circumstances, it's just a terrible thing. ... It makes no sense to me,"
said the elder McCall, who had not heard from his son Friday.
