AND NEW ORLEANS HOSPITAL KILLS STRANDED PATIENT

Decision to end a life in city of woe

ARRIVING in New Orleans last Sunday, I have spent a week reporting the unfolding misery and ruined lives in the aftermath of the hurricane.

But nothing, in the plethora of grim tales of disaster, compares with a terrible incident recounted to me as the week drew to a close. There was a 380-pound man stranded on the seventh floor of a New Orleans hospital. Unable to get him down five flights of stairs to the second-floor exit, through which other patients were being evacuated onto rescue boats to escape the rising floodwater, a female manager took a shocking decision. She ordered that he be given euthanasia.

A bearded, middle-aged doctor, who is still wearing his green hospital garb, tells me the sad story as he and his colleagues sit at the muddy, squalid refugee-receiving post on New Orleans' I10 Highway. He does not want to give me his name and will not identify the patient out of respect.

But he wants people to know what happened in there. His lower jaw quivers as he recalls the events of Wednesday night.

"We had minutes to get out, and I asked, 'What are we going to do about this guy, because he's a big man. It was going to be tough getting him down those stairs - the elevators weren't working. That woman turned to me and said straight out, 'We're going to help him to heaven'. It makes me want to break down, how that man's life was taken away."

It is one of so many gruesome and desperate stories that have poured forth from the tens of thousands of refugees.

There was a woman holding court in the lobby of my hotel in downtown New Orleans on Tuesday as the floodwaters lapped across the threshold. Her name was Hilary Callaghan and she was here with her husband Kevin for "a cheap thrill".

They had come from their home in Ohio on a low-cost weekend, knowing that the room rate would be lower during storm season.

"We thought we would make the hurricane part of the adventure," she enthuses as others around her are hoisting suitcases and bags of possessions over their heads and wading through the rising water to get out while they can.

I am sure that from her hotel room, where she almost certainly spent the last five or so days holed up with little or no food or water, and sewage backing up in the toilet and her fellow guests weeping in fear, that she might have changed her mind. I am sure that too that if she had seen what I have seen over the last few days, she might have thought again.

I wish that she had seen the tears rolling down the faces of the mothers who came off the evacuation helicopters clutching their naked babies and unsure whether their husbands were alive or dead.

I wish she had seen the elderly nursing home residents being winched off rooftops on to a helicopter, wrapping sheets around their heads as they were too scared to look down.

I wish she had seen the squalor in which evacuees were made to wait at the side of a road because state and federal officials couldn't get their act together to evacuate them faster.

Althea Castillo's new home is an indoor baseball stadium in Houston, Texas, which she shares with 11,000 new neighbours. She and her children Keron and Ketaj lived off tinned peaches for three days after Hurricane Katrina drove them on to the roof of their apartment block. They had hoped to ride out the storm in a hotel with Althea's niece, Tiffany Washington, who worked there. But the morning before the hurricane hit, hotel managers announced that staff could not shelter there, leaving the four of them, with Althea's husband Catalino, no time to evacuate the city.

"I don't never want to come back to New Orleans again," Althea, 32, tells me at the highway refugee post. "There's nothing here for me no more."

Then there was Charlene Brown-Williams, 41, lying on the floor of the city's airport with around 10,000 others awaiting emergency flights out. She does not know what happened to any of her friends or relatives and is being sent several states away to start a new life in a shelter. "I went to sleep on the night of the storm and I prayed. I'm still praying for those angels to come and take me. There's somebody out there with wings on their back but so far they're not coming through for me."

JACQUI GODDARD IN NEW ORLEANS

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