Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, much has been written about deaths that might have been prevented but for the negligence of various institutions.  We have covered the responsibility of the Army Corps of Engineers, and its “monumental negligence” for not preserving the levees that collapsed.  But now, we are finding out that many excruciating deaths in hospital and nursing homes could have been prevented too.

A combined project of the New York Times and ProPublica has reported on a massive corporate failure at New Orleans hospitals to start emergency backup power systems, causing patients to gradually die as they “languished for days awaiting transport.”

In fact, 3 years before Katrina, one of Pendleton Memorial Methodist Hospital’s senior executives wrote in a report that the hospital lacked the sum of generators needed “to accommodate an emergency flood with 15 feet of water,” and that one of hospital’s 2 main generators would be “nonfunctional in about 2 feet of flood water.”  The report, written in response to alike flooding that had already occurred in Texas, recommended that a $7.5 million fix be undertaken to avert such a tragedy.  That warning was never heeded.

One more patient who died at Pendelton was 73-year-old Althea LaCoste.  In her family’s lawsuit, they say she died horribly and, in turns out, with no cause, in “sweltering heat after nurses spent hours pumping air into her lungs by hand in the pitch dark…”.

In the meantime, according to Robert Wise, vice-president of the Joint Commission, the accreditation body for the majority American hospitals, “There are many [hospitals] that still know they have to move their generator,” and that with no power, will be “literally dead in the water.”

It seems there is simply no end to the institutional negligence surrounding Hurricane Katrina.