Patient Evacuation at Touro Infirmary During Hurricane Katrina became a disputed account of rescue and abandonment. An anonymous Touro doctor alleged that fourteen patients judged too critical to evacuate were given morphine and left behind; toxicology tests later found high levels of morphine and midazolam in some bodies recovered at Touro and Specialty Hospital of New Orleans. The evidence presented in the book does not establish that every patient received the drugs or resolve precisely what happened to each person, but it places the evacuation amid wider questions about how hospitals treated patients considered difficult to move.

Evacuation Under Pressure

A doctor at Touro described the episode in an anonymous letter to the attorney general’s office. According to the doctor, a military commander overseeing the evacuation identified Odun Arechaga as one of fourteen patients considered too critical to transport. The doctor alleged that medical workers gave the patients morphine and left them behind. The account makes the classification itself consequential: patients’ medical severity, which might ordinarily call for greater protection, was presented as a reason they were not taken with the evacuees.

The allegation was not an isolated reference to medication at Touro. Toxicology tests on some bodies recovered there and at Specialty Hospital of New Orleans revealed high levels of morphine and midazolam, the same combination used at Memorial Medical Center. Those results provide a concrete point of comparison across hospitals, but they do not by themselves establish who administered the drugs, why they were given, or whether every patient described in the anonymous account received them.

Competing Accounts of the Rescue

A later account by Touro archivist Catherine C. Kahn presented the evacuation as a success. It reported that, after a fire-department superintendent gave staff one hour to leave even if patients had to be left behind, workers labored intensely and rescued everyone. Kahn described the effort through a recollection attributed to a doctor who compared the scene to Miss Saigon and emphasized that no patient was left behind.

The book qualifies that account: Kahn had not been at the hospital during Katrina and apparently did not know about Arechaga. Her version and the anonymous doctor’s report therefore do not carry the same information about the patients at issue. Set beside the allegation concerning Arechaga and the fourteen patients, the sweeping claim that everyone was rescued becomes less conclusive—not proof that every detail of the complaint was correct, but a record of how accounts of the evacuation could omit people whose fate complicated a story of complete rescue.

Arechaga’s Later Life and the Record

Arechaga survived the immediate disaster. His longtime close friend Nina Levy arranged for him to be transferred after Katrina to a nursing home near her in Illinois. He died on January 13, 2011, more than five years later. His later transfer and death do not settle the allegation about the evacuation, but they distinguish his known subsequent fate from the broader, less specific claims about the fourteen patients.

The episode remains significant in the book because the record is assembled from sources with different vantage points: an anonymous complaint, investigative and medical materials, and a retrospective institutional history. The toxicology findings corroborate the presence of the drugs in some recovered bodies, while leaving questions of administration and intent unresolved. The contrast between a claim of universal rescue and a report that critical patients were left behind makes the evacuation not simply a story of whether Touro emptied, but of whose presence and experience were counted in the account of its success.