Nursing home deaths in NOLA

Folks chose to live in St. Bernard Parish, La., because it was a safe community. After several years and many hurricane predictions, the residents of St. Rita’s Nursing home and their families knew all about hurricanes and how urgent messages to evacuate preceded several days of uncomfortable, make-shift living away from the comfort of their own homes.
Evacuating a nursing home involves a tremendous undertaking – as El Dorado’s nursing homes discovered in January after the explosion at Teris. Confusion quickly sets in for the residents, just loading the buses can be a major ordeal. Keeping everyone clean, dry, medicated and calm challenges any staff in the best of times without the addition of an emergency. With everyone pulling together, the El Dorado homes worked their evacuation plan with generally good spirits. Evacuating, is not, however, easy – as nursing homes in southern Louisiana have realized every couple years during hurricane season. Nursing home owner Mabel Mangano did not want deal with the complications of evacuation. She chose to weather out Hurricane Katrina in the facility – just as she had done many previous hurricanes that came close to the area.
This time she lost her gamble with the forces of nature.
Because of her decision, the bodies of at least 15 residents and possibly as many as 35 are now decomposing inside the one-story facility about 7 miles east of downtown New Orleans, according to an Associated Press story.
The staff at St. Rita’s Nursing home had developed and filed the mandatory plan to evacuate their 60 dependent residents in the event of an emergency. Instead of following it, the staff and patients remained as the storm flooded the low-lying parish of St. Bernard.
St. Bernard Coroner Bryan Bertucci said he called Mangano during a Parish Council meeting at 2 p.m. on Aug. 28, a day before the storm. He said he asked her why she had not followed the evacuation and removed her patients to Baton Rouge and Lafayette on the to buses set aside for them.
“She told me she had a generator and five nurses and had gotten permission of the patients’ families to stay put,” Bertucci said. “Then she asked me if I thought the council would be mad at her.”
The anger of a few councilmen with her not complying in no way compared with the wrath of Katrina waged against those who stayed. Mangano should have gotten out of the way.
Mangano had become calloused to the council’s possible displeasure. She decided to make her own decision and ask forgiveness afterwards.
“We have pleaded with those people for years to execute their evacuation plan,” said Dr. Paul Verrette, medical director for the St. Bernard Office of Emergency Preparedness. “They never do.”
“The water level rose from the ground to 8 feet in 15 minutes,” said Councilman Tony Ricky Melerine.
The staff at St. Rita’s managed to float 20 patients on mattresses across half mile of flood water to nearby Beauregard High School as the water level rose, said Couture, one of the rescuers. One died on the way, two died there, and a fourth died afterward in the hospital, he said. Those deaths pushed the confirmed body count to 19.
Mangano could not be reached for comment on her decision. Her whereabouts and safety are unknown.
The community’s four other large nursing homes and assisted living facilities followed their parish evacuation plan. Their patients survived.
A week later, on Tuesday, when the rescue crews finally made their way to St. Bernard Parish – a bedroom and retirement community bounded by water on three sides – the high water mark in the nursing home reached a foot shy of the ceiling inside the football field sized structure.
Mangano, with an established evacuation plan in place, buses ready to help her move quickly, gambled with Mother Nature one time too many and lost the gamble, the lives of the patients entrusted to her care and possibly her own life as well.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)