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11 Evacuees Have Died Here
UPN 21 News
USA
September
12, 2005
Nearly one dozen evacuees from Hurricane Katrina have not survived being moved across state -- most of them elderly patients or people who did not receive needed medical attention before or during evacuation, Caddo Parish's coroner said today.
Eleven people from southeast Louisiana have died here in the past two weeks, Dr. George McCormick said.
The latest are an 83-year-old nursing home patient and a stillborn baby whose mother experienced complications as a result of being evacuated, McCormick said. He would not provide specifics about the baby's death but said an autopsy will be performed.
Most of the people who died were nursing home patients or people with pre-existing health conditions that could not be treated while they were waiting to be evacuated or during the chaos after the hurricane hit, McCormick said. People have died in nursing homes here and on buses and an evacuation aircraft, he said.
While order has been restored in New Orleans and progress is being made in cleaning up the damage from the hurricane, McCormick said the process of identifying the dead and notifying families is chaotic.
"We can't even find out who to report the deaths to," McCormick said this afternoon.
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