OPINION
DOCTORS Lounge
( continued from page 31 ) the many legacies of Katrina , which hurt so many of the poorest parts of New Orleans , is the ruin of houses made uninhabitable by black mold . Yet , people still live in some of them , having nowhere else to go .
The mold Stachybotrys Chartarum causes allergic respiratory illness with wheezing , asthma , coughing and recurrent infection , and it triggers nausea and migraines . Some have claimed it is implicated in the deaths of four university professors who worked for years in classrooms with spore counts that were deemed acceptable by the university , but unacceptable by outside consultants . It has been deemed the cause of “ sick building syndrome ” and as such , has resulted in condemnation of public buildings .
What happens with this plague of hurricanes rings true to anyone whose home has ever flooded . I read accounts of our Great Flood of 1937 , and the survivors sounded the same notes of despair and thankfulness , in the same sentence . In early January of 1937 , it began to rain up and down the Mississippi and Ohio valleys . It rained and rained and rained , and three weeks later the flood gauge in Cincinnati got to 80 feet , its highest ever , and here , to 57 feet . More than 60 percent of Louisville was under water , and the power failed on January 24 , not to be fully restored until Feb 12 . The Chicago Tribune of Jan 28 th quoted Louisville Mayor Neville Miller , who said the death toll stood at about 200 , but that the coroner estimated up to 400 , since the men in boats were still saving the living , and leaving the dead where they were . Bodies they did load into boats were being incinerated to avoid disease . One rescued lady from Jeffersonville said , “ We were transported out of there like cattle , but we were satisfied .”
The University of Notre Dame sent a plane full of hip waders . Fish were being caught in the lobby of the Brown Hotel . The Tribune ran this item as well : “ Looters , tippers , rum pots or just the destitute and thirsty ? Two liquor stores have been raided .”
Eventually , the fire department mechanic Jake Britt proposed that a pontoon bridge be built between downtown and the Highlands , the closest dry land . Capt . William S . Arrasmith , an architect who served in the Army Reserve , supervised 300 men who laid planks over hundreds of empty bourbon barrels . They were held together with cable secured to telephone poles . Boats from all over ferried the sick , exhausted , wet and hungry citizens to safety at last . City Health Commissioner H . R . Leavell told the Tribune that “ We have inoculated between 75,000 and 100,000 people against typhoid , and with all the volunteer nurses and doctors , we are well set up .”
In Katrina , the hospitals of New Orleans were basically killed off , one by one . For Harvey , it was a different kind of flood , and a different medical story .
The medical community of Houston cheered collectively last week , since all of its planning had helped . Sixteen years ago , Tropical Storm Allison had closed major hospitals with flooding in all the tunnels that so conveniently connected them . Operating rooms , pharmacies , central supply and ERs were inundated . The hospitals responded by setting aside their competitive urges long enough to enforce a plan of mandatory catastrophe planning , with shared resources , reporting to a central emergency center three times a day . They updated and reviewed these plans every year . They put in submarine doors in the tunnels so the flooding could be compartmentalized . They designed and redesigned their evacuation plans , with special attention to which hospital should retain which types of patients , matching diagnoses to clinical expertise . And , with Harvey , their plans worked . There were no large scale evacuations and Ben Taub Hospital , the trauma center , was closed to ambulances and ran out of food for a day , but by and large , the team building had paid off .
I hope that our hospital leaders , if ever the hurricanes reach us in all their fury , will be able to say the same thing .
Dr . Barry practices Internal Medicine with Norton Community Medical Associates-Barret . She is a clinical associate professor at the University of Louisville School of Medicine , Department of Medicine .
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32 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE