Posted on 09/10/2005 7:25:02 AM PDT by jrusty101
Edited on 09/11/2005 5:24:32 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
St. Bernard Parish officials say that 32 of the home's roughly 60 residents died on Aug. 29, more than a week ago.
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Update 9-11-11
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"..And finally, on the question I raised a few days ago about Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard’s tearful story about his emergency manager’s mother drowning in a St. Bernard nursing home, I think the evidence shows pretty clearly that Broussard was embellishing the story. Readers helpfully pointed me to the following news accounts:
New York Times: In nursing home, a fight lost to rising waters.
Newsday: Desperately seeking survivors.
MSNBC: This anger comes from watching death.
From the MSNBC item:
The man he was talking about is Thomas Rodrigue, who told “Dateline” that his 92-year-old mother was one of 32 elderly people found dead at the St. Rita’s nursing home.
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MSNBC Quote:
"..The man he was talking about is Thomas Rodrigue, who told “Dateline” that his 92-year-old mother was one of 32 elderly people found dead at the St. Rita’s nursing home..."
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But the 32 people who died at St. Rita’s nursing home didn’t die on Friday; they died earlier in the week, when the floodwaters first inundated the low-lying facility. Rather than being attributable to the federal authorities’ slow response (which was pretty much the point of Broussard’s version of the story), the death of those senior citizens was more the fault of local authorities (who failed to evacuate them) than of federal officials (who wouldn’t have been there in time to rescue them under the best of circumstances).
So, assuming the MSNBC story is accurate, Broussard’s story was at least significantly embellished. The tear-jerking account of the repeated calls to momma were fictional (or at least were displaced from their actual time of occurrence, which would have to have been before or during the storm, not during the several days afterward when FEMA was MIA). And if that part was fiction, it would mean that Broussard, for all the apparent sincerity in his emotional on-air breakdown, was willing to lie in order to make his story work better as political theater, which in turn makes it harder for me to credit the rest of the slow-FEMA-response anecdotes he described .."
They should never have planned to have ridden the storm out with helpless peoples' lives at stake. I think that is criminal negligence.
Why do you all have such a high average weekly death toll?
I thought the same thing. Why didn't get go get his own mother out of there?
It is really too bad there is no accountability of the MSM.
Even their self examination ends up being an in dept study of why the "msm's poop does not stink".
Does anyone have a list of who owned St. Rita's? I wonder if someone might be trying to color the story in such a way to avoid possible law suits?
Call me cynical but I did not buy that story, and I think that Broussard is a piece of vermin. They left her to die they had a mandatory evac order in the face of a Cat 5 hurricane and they knew that in the event of a levee break that she would drown in the lowest spot in NOLA.
Here is another article about the owner and her refusal to evacuate.
Nursing home strewn with decaying bodies
BY VICTOR EPSTEIN BLOOMBERG NEWS
Posted on Thursday, September 8, 2005
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The 60 residents of St. Rita’s Nursing Home had a plan to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Instead, the staff and patients remained as the storm flooded the low-lying parish of St. Bernard.
Because of that decision, the bodies of at least 15 residents and possibly as many as 35 are now decomposing inside the one-story facility in this area about six miles east of downtown where 67,000 people once lived.
The body of one elderly woman, clothed in a thin housedress, legs spread wide, sits on the concrete floor of the front patio. A 2-foot-high statue of the Virgin Mary still stands in the lobby, facing outward. Nearby, the thin, bony body of an elderly man is draped over the back of a chair where the receding waters left it. Outside, debris covers the roof of a Hummer sport utility vehicle, which area officials say belongs to a staff member. "When we saw that Hummer still in the parking lot a few days ago, we knew we were in trouble because that’s the first vehicle they would have used to escape," Parish Councilman Tony Ricky Melerine said Tuesday afternoon.
Officials of St. Bernard Parish, a bedroom and retirement community bounded by water on three sides, said the parish death toll may reach 500. They blamed the lawlessness of the inner city for diverting resources and attention from them.
The shortage of manpower and impassability of roads prevented neighboring residents from getting inside St. Rita’s until Tuesday, nine days after Katrina. "It doesn’t look like anyone has been here yet to make a count," Melerine said as he poled a skiff over the black muck of St. Bernard’s flooded streets. "This was my district. We gonna have to do it."
Inside St. Rita’s, the signature of the brown high-water mark reaches a foot shy of the ceiling inside the football-field-size structure. Six inches of sewage, mud and putrefied tissue coat the floor in a slippery, dark brown scum strewn with broken furniture, bodies and wheelchairs. "This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and I drug bodies to the levee after Hurricane Betsy," said 60-year-old Raymond Couture. He and Melerine chopped their way out of the councilman’s attic with axes at the height of the storm. They’ve been working 20hour days since.
Officials fear the horror at St. Rita’s could be repeated elsewhere in St. Bernard Parish. The community’s four other large nursing homes and assisted-living facilities followed their parish evacuation plan. Still, it’s unclear how many smaller centers were emptied. OBLITERATED COMMUNITIES
Parish firefighters say the communities of Delacroix and Yscloskey are completely gone. They lay outside the protective levees and may be nothing more than prefixes in the Greater New Orleans telephone book today: 265, 267, 676 and 684.
St. Bernard must also contend with a fuel spill at the Murphy Oil USA Inc. refinery. The community’s three refineries provide 15 percent of the nation’s gasoline, according to Parish President Henry "Junior" Rodriguez.
Only five of the sheriff’s 75 squad cars are running, and every member of the Parish Council is homeless, he said. "We have collected more than 80 bodies, and we still haven’t reached the worst part of the parish," Rodriguez said Tuesday from an emergency operations center inside an Exxon Mobil refinery. "There’s not a home left here that’s livable. There may be 25 homes out of 25,000 that are intact."
Cows, horses and dogs wander the streets of St. Bernard Parish, limping between ruined cars and boats. Elsewhere in the parish, packs of feral dogs are being shot. "Most of the animals are dead," said Rodriguez. "The dogs have not eaten, and they’re starting to get to the bodies. We had a pack of four pit bulls kill a horse."
Every home and business bears some scar from Katrina. Splintered telephone poles lean drunkenly across streets or hang in the air, suspended from tangled wires. "We have a lot of elderly residents who moved here because there’s so little crime," said Rodriguez. "They came because it was so safe."
Unlike in downtown, no one reported looting or gunfire in St. Bernard Parish. But a relentless surge of water pouring over levees pushed the parish’s populace up into their attics and onto their roofs.
Survivors say nature unleashed more fury on this community than on any other parish in the area. "It was worse in St. Bernard than in New Orleans," said parish firefighter Daren Schaeffer, 41. "We had 20 feet of water in some places."
Parish officials said the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not show up until Monday, a week after the storm. On Tuesday, FEMA approved $31 million in immediate aid and dropped off a mobile command center for the parish government.
Members of a FEMA disaster mortuary response team were expected to begin working in the parish Wednesday. National Guard troops are scarcer in St. Bernard than in New Orleans’ central business district, where truckloads of troops still hunt looters. "We’re glad FEMA finally showed up, but for the first five days after the storm, no one even came looking to see how we were doing," said parish Councilman Judy Hoffmeister. "Now they say they’re going to give us everything we need, but we were in desperate need of it days and days ago."
Generators from the Department of Homeland Security arrived Tuesday to power St. Bernard’s water plant, Parish President Rodriguez said on the parish’s Web site. He said the water level fell 6 more inches Tuesday and that five of eight pumps in the area were working. HEAPS OF BODIES, FURNITURE
Each closed door inside St. Rita’s darkened hallways is a nightmare. Some are blocked by tangled heaps of furniture and bodies. The body count is cursory. The searchers fear falling into the muck, whose composition is not in doubt.
Fifteen bodies were counted inside the building and many more are suspected of being there or of having floated outside. Some doors wedged shut with debris could not be opened at all.
The staff at St. Rita’s managed to float 20 patients on mattresses across a half-mile of floodwater 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. The nursing home held 65 patients and at least six staff members when the storm hit. "The water level rose from the ground to 8 feet in 15 minutes, and it did that all over the parish," said Melerine, the parish councilman.
Parish officials called the owner of St. Rita’s before the storm to ask her why she hadn’t evacuated patients, said Dr. Paul Verrette, medical director for the St. Bernard Office of Emergency Preparedness. "We have pleaded with those people for years to execute their evacuation plan," Verrette said. "They never do."
St. Bernard Coroner Bryan Bertucci said he called nursing home owner Mabel 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 plan she filed with the parish and removed her patients to Baton Rouge and Lafayette on the two buses set aside for them. "She told me she had a generator and five nurses and had gotten the permission of the patients’ families to stay put," Bertucci said. "Then she asked me if I thought the council would be mad at her."
Mangano could not be reached for comment. Her whereabouts and safety are unknown. "This is beyond the council now," Rodriguez, the parish president, said. "I suspect that she’ll wish she had left by the time this is done, if she doesn’t already." Information for this article was contributed by Daniel Acker and Todd Zeranski of Bloomberg News.
Trent Lott did not blame President Bush for anything.
The woman who was mentioned by Broussard, the woman who was the mother of his friend, could not even be rescued by her son, who was with the emergency rescue dept of that parish!
Broussard's friend could not rescue his own mother, and yet, it is somehow the fed. govt's fault.
(Yes, the "Calvary" came too late to rescue her. Guess poor old Aaron never learned that "Cavalry" is the word for soldiers on horseback, not Calvary. Maybe we shouldn't nitpick in the face of tragedy, but he brought it on himself with his ridiculous accusations.)
BTTT
Lott was blaming everyone in the federal government. Face it, the media, dems, many pubbies and especially the so called local leaders were in full; "when in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout" mode.
I turned to my wife after watching Broussard's breakdown and called BS. The guy was hysterical and didn't shed a single tear. Total act. Total scumbag. He was playing CYA because HE didn't do his part...
"BROUSSAND....LIAR LIAR TAIL ON FIRE...."
And we all knew it at the time.....Freepers' gut instinct panned out once again.
PERFECT!
Here in the Coastal areas, Nurshing homes bug out WAY ahead of anyone else. The one on the beach evacs so often that the residents ask about "when are we going to go on that big ride to the country again?"
Here's a link to a story by Joe Vasquez for CBS 5 that further reinforces your account:
http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_250212859.html
Several articles were posted from N.O.'s paper where Aaron's associates said...what's up with Aaron...this is NOT like him in the least. Then we find he's in legal doodoo, FBI caught him in some sort of sting op...payoff 101..
I think this nursing home turned away buses sent to help. But about your comment, if you are a member of a corrupt political system, which is the norm not the exception in LA, lying is a natural event done every day.
That sob story had phony written all over it. For one thing, most phone service was out, including mobile phones.
So how was the poor woman's son able to call her "Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday" to tell her "help's a-comin,' mama"-- and then she drowns on Friday? Three days after the water's sudden rise?
It boggles the imagination to think that anyone believed Broussard's tale -- that somehow the old lady sits there with a working telephone in her hand for three days and only then succumbs to high water.
But the eagerly credulous MSM was a-buyin' it. Starting with Timmy Russert himself.
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