Little Rest for Storm-Weary Hospital Staff

Cyprien L. Vertil sat in a darkened corner of the Christus Hospital-St. Elizabeth lobby Saturday, desperately trying not to fall asleep.

The doctor could use the rest. For the last three days, while Hurricane Rita slowly churned its way toward the Texas coast, the hospital staff raced to evacuate more than 300 patients.

They couldn’t get everyone out in time. By Friday evening, as the wind stripped many of the trees on the front lawn bare and the rain pounded the windows, about 130 patients remained inside the six-story brick structure.

So did hundreds of others: doctors and nurses, cooks and chaplains, social workers and X-ray technicians, friends and family members of the ill -- all determined to stay and not abandon the patients.

“I was terrified myself, I’ll admit it,” said Vertil, whose teal-colored medical scrubs were worn and creased with sweat. “But what could you do? We had no choice. We had to stay.”

On Saturday afternoon, though the storm had waned, there was no time for a nap.

With no water, no working sewage system and only enough power from the generators to run emergency lights and key medical equipment, the hospital had become unfit for even the healthy to remain.

“It was a rough night,” said Paul Duriso, a Beaumont resident who spent the night at the hospital because his wife was ill and needed care.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency had rounded up scores of ambulances to help in Rita’s aftermath. After the storm passed, many of the emergency medical teams drove here in convoys early Saturday afternoon. The first group of 65 crammed bumper to bumper on the hospital’s curved driveway and stretched for more than two blocks along Calder Street. Their flashing lights painted the debris-littered roadway in shades of red and yellow.

Inside the hospital, where the air was thick with humidity, gurneys filled the entrance. Heart monitors sat next to dozens of canisters of oxygen, waiting to be loaded onto buses and taken to Houston.

Nurses skirted wheelchairs and slid between the beds, carrying boxes of gauze and crates of syringes. One woman slipped on a stethoscope that had been dropped on the floor, and nearly landed on a doctor, who had curled up on the tile to rest.

Paramedics and other medical personnel moved from patient to patient, trying to assess their medical needs.

Two men wearing Stephenville, Texas, Fire Department uniforms, gingerly grasped an elderly woman. She cried out in pain. They immediately let her go.

“Does anyone know the story of this woman?” one man yelled out.

“I’m not sure,” replied one nurse as she ran by. “Maybe it’s her hip? I think she was on the third floor. Dialysis?”

Hospital officials carefully tracked the storm’s progress this week, said William B. McMillan, Christus Health vice president of medical affairs and regional chief medical officer.

By Thursday morning, when weather forecasts predicted the eye of the hurricane had shifted to this part of the coast, officials decided to evacuate patients at St. Elizabeth and its sister site, St. Mary’s in Port Arthur. The two facilities are operated and owned by Christus Health. The roadways out of town, however, were congested with residents fleeing the storm.

Military helicopters began shuttling St. Elizabeth’s most serious patients to Southeast Texas Regional Airport, outside Port Arthur, where planes then flew them to hospitals outside the storm’s reach.

By Friday, St. Mary’s was empty. All of St. Elizabeth’s critical care patients -- “the people who need oxygen or ongoing treatment,” said McMillan -- and most of the other patients were evacuated.

The rest were stuck.

“Considering how much things were changing, and how little time we had to react, you have to understand that moving 318 patients and finding them space in other facilities is a whole lot of people,” McMillan said. “We knew we were in for a long night.”

The power died around midnight, and one of the emergency generators failed. Doctors and nurses raced from room to room, making sure that heart monitors, oxygen machines and other equipment continued to operate.

Patients and family members clung to one another as the wind raged outside the hospital, creating an eerie and constant background noise. The roof of the hospital’s wellness center peeled off, cascading rain into the rooms and drenching the doctors resting there.

“Dr. Linda Ray came in, wet.” said McMillan, who caught a few hours of sleep in the hallway outside the hospital’s intensive care unit.

About 1 a.m. Saturday, water had seeped into the walls, shorting out the electrical system and setting off the shrill bell of the fire alarm.

Soon after, the wind shattered a window, spraying glass into a patient’s eye. The staff hurried into rooms with windows, and pulled the patients into the hallways.

“I couldn’t take it anymore,” said Joan Lanier, a high school speech teacher who lives in Beaumont. She stayed at St. Elizabeth’s to give company to a friend who worked there. “I thought we were all going to die, or go crazy.”

While her friend slept, Lanier said she used a flashlight to make her way to the hospital chapel. As she passed by windows, she peered out: Tree branches flew by “like something in the Wizard of Oz.”

After the battery waned, Lanier used one hand to reach into the nearly pitch-black room. She touched the back of a pew, she slid onto the cushion, bowed her head and began to pray.

“That’s when I heard someone snoring in the front. He was so loud, it was like listening to Pavarotti,” Lanier said.

By 3 a.m., the fire alarm went off again.

An hour later, it went off for a third time. It took the maintenance staff, moving carefully by the glow of a flashlight, nearly 20 minutes to figure out a way to turn it off.

The water cut off before dawn. So did the sewage system.

But as the rain began to ease, there was a bit of good news: The hospital’s kitchen still worked. Lunch was served hot: beef stroganoff.

By 5:30 p.m., there were 58 patients to evacuate. A nurse slipped into a high-back chair next to Vertil. Her eyes were red, her skin the color of ash.

“Have you slept? At all?” Vertil asked wearily.

She shook her head no.

“How long?” Vertil asked.

She held up three fingers. Her chin slumped to her chest.

Vertil shut his eyes. A few minutes later, he shook his head and stood up. He nudged the nurse awake. Together, they rejoined the chaos.

Times staff writer Scott Gold contributed to this report.