Patients left behind during Touro Infirmary evacuation and Odun Arechaga’s rescue

The evacuation of Touro Infirmary during Hurricane Katrina exposed a crisis in which patients were moved out of rising danger but some were left without reliable care. Its most consequential rescue was that of Odun Arechaga, a seventy-year-old man who had been found in critical condition after being left at the hospital. Later accounts also raised allegations that some patients deemed too critical to move were given morphine and abandoned. The evidence describes severe breakdowns and serious concerns about patient care, while leaving individual treatment and intent questions open to investigation.

Crisis and Patients at Risk

Before the hurricane, Arechaga had suffered a heart attack, lost consciousness, and sustained brain damage while waiting for rescuers who struggled to find his home. Neurologists advised his daughter to let him die, but she refused. In the days before the storm, he regained the ability to breathe without assistance and became somewhat more responsive. His condition and recovery make his later discovery at Touro more than a simple case of a patient who could not be evacuated: he had already begun to show signs of improvement.

Touro staff moved eighteen critical patients, including Arechaga, from the ground floor to the third floor. They did not know how high the floodwaters would rise or how quickly. The third floor, however, lost power as the hospital’s generators began to fail. Some were decades old and had not been tested for prolonged operation; the account also notes possibly contaminated government fuel and an electrical setup that did not support air-conditioning in many areas. The cooling system itself depended on the crippled city water supply. When ventilator batteries ran down, staff had to provide breathing support by hand. Many patients did not tolerate being taken off their machines, and some died.

Triage and the Evacuation

Touro remained reachable by land after the storm, unlike Memorial Medical Center and Lindy Boggs Medical Center, but access did not resolve the danger inside. Staff later described a triage practice in which patients who could not say their names were allegedly denied intravenous fluids. That account was especially painful to relatives of a man with advanced Parkinson’s disease who could not speak and died unexpectedly. Other patients were marked black, meaning they were considered too sick to move, and were not taken to the helipad.

The accounts also distinguish between staff who continued trying to save patients and units whose entire staff reportedly left by way of the hospital garage. Some workers returned to help; after the storm, some nurses were fired and reported to the nursing board for abandonment. An emergency-room nurse placed in charge of triage later said that National Guardsmen ordered the last remaining staff to leave for their own safety and reassured them that soldiers would stay with the roughly two dozen patients still inside. The evacuation thus ended under pressure, with staff facing a stark conflict between remaining with patients and leaving when instructed to protect themselves.

Arechaga’s Discovery and Rescue

On Friday, September 2, witnesses found Arechaga on a gurney on Touro’s third floor, with his medical record at his feet and small Styrofoam coffee cups taped over his ears for reasons the account does not explain. National Guardsmen wheeled him out and called for medical staff from a smaller hospital across the street. The rescuers found that his airway was nearly blocked, his tracheotomy collar needed attention, his heart was beating slowly, and his oxygen level was low. They suctioned his airway, changed the collar, and removed his soiled clothing. As he was loaded into an ambulance, he opened his eyes.

The contrast between the advice his daughter had rejected before the storm and his survival through this rescue gives the episode its defining reversal. His return to responsiveness before Katrina had been limited, and the account does not claim that the rescue resolved his underlying injuries. It does show that he was alive when discovered, that rescuers intervened, and that he opened his eyes as he was taken away—details that complicate any assumption that patients classified as too critical to move were beyond help.

Allegations and the Limits of the Evidence

A Touro doctor later wrote anonymously to the attorney general’s office that a military commander who had supervised the evacuation described Arechaga as one of fourteen patients considered too critical. The doctor alleged that medical workers had given those patients morphine and left them behind. This was an attributed account, not a finding that establishes what Arechaga personally received. Toxicology testing of some bodies recovered at Touro and Specialty Hospital of New Orleans found high levels of morphine and midazolam, a combination also detected in cases investigated elsewhere. Those results heightened concern about patient treatment but do not, on their own, establish the dose, timing, cause of death, or intent in any one case.

The investigation of Touro therefore involved distinct kinds of evidence: witness descriptions of how patients were triaged and left, an anonymous doctor’s report of the commander’s account, and postmortem drug findings. Keeping those strands separate matters. The rescue of Arechaga establishes that a patient described as too critical was found alive and received emergency care; the toxicology findings concern some recovered bodies, not necessarily him. Together, the accounts document both the hospital’s operational collapse and the difficulty of determining, patient by patient, what happened amid a hurried evacuation, failing power, and fragmented care.