Touro Infirmary

Touro Infirmary was one of the New Orleans hospitals whose response to Hurricane Katrina unsettled the confident story that every patient had been safely evacuated. Although the hospital remained reachable by land, power failures, threatened violence, conflicting accounts of staff departures, and the discovery of Odun Arechaga alive after he had been left behind turned Touro into a focal point of post-storm investigation. Its experience is presented alongside the crisis at Memorial Medical Center and the markedly different account from Charity Hospital, complicating any simple division between heroic rescue and abandonment.

The Hospital and Its Evacuation

Touro Infirmary faced the storm with patients who depended on intensive care and functioning equipment. Staff did not know how high the floodwaters would rise or how quickly conditions would change. They moved eighteen critically ill patients, including Arechaga, from the ground floor, where backup power remained available, to the third floor. That floor lost power as the hospital’s generators began to fail. Some generators were decades old, had not been tested for such prolonged operation, and were reportedly running on possibly contaminated fuel. The hospital’s backup arrangements also did not reliably support air conditioning, which depended in turn on the impaired city water system.

As ventilator battery backups ran down, staff had to provide breathing support by hand. The account notes that many patients could not tolerate being disconnected from their machines and died. These failures made evacuation a question not only of transport but of whether patients could remain alive while waiting to be moved. Touro’s ground access distinguished it from Memorial Medical Center and Lindy Boggs Medical Center, which were cut off by floodwater, but accessibility did not spare Touro from power loss, uncertain orders, or danger in the city.

Workers also feared reports that violence was breaking out. Touro emergency-room nurse Brent Becnel later described National Guard personnel arriving near the end of the evacuation and directing the remaining staff to leave for their safety. The soldiers reportedly assured them that they would stay with the roughly two dozen patients still there. Cars formed a line with armed personnel at the front. Staff were distressed at leaving, but accepted the instruction in the belief that their own safety mattered to whether they could work again when the hospital reopened.

Conflicting Accounts and the Abandoned Patient

Touro’s public account and the complaints reaching investigators did not align. After the storm, chief executive Les Hirsch praised the hospital’s performance in an essay, saying staff had remained despite a fire-department superintendent giving them an hour to leave and had not departed until the last patient was evacuated. An anonymous letter copied to the state attorney general’s office challenged that account. It reported that workers from a nearby hospital had found a patient alive and abandoned at Touro on Friday, September 2, 2005, and predicted that the truth would eventually emerge.

The patient was Arechaga, a seventy-year-old man who had sustained brain damage after a heart attack before the hurricane. His daughter had declined neurologists’ advice to let him die; in the days before the storm he had regained the ability to breathe without assistance and had become somewhat more responsive. Investigators heard that National Guardsmen found him on the hospital’s third floor and called medical workers from a smaller hospital across the street. Those rescuers provided care and arranged his transfer. Arechaga opened his eyes as he was loaded into an ambulance.

Arechaga’s later history gives the discovery a further human dimension without resolving the dispute about Touro’s evacuation. In the 1960s, he had founded the Sabaean Religious Order in Chicago and became known as an elaborate storyteller with a fascination for disasters. After Katrina, his longtime friend Nina Levy arranged for him to move to a nursing home near her in Illinois. He died on January 13, 2011, more than five years after the storm. His survival at Touro, after he had been considered too critical to move, became a specific counterexample to accounts that no patient had been left behind.

Triage, Staff Departures, and Investigation

Some Touro staff later described a triage practice in which patients unable to say their names were not given intravenous fluids. This was an allegation, not a documented universal rule, but it haunted relatives, including the family of a man with advanced Parkinson’s disease who could not speak and died unexpectedly. Other patients were reportedly marked as too sick to move and not taken to the helipad. The accounts expose how patients’ communication abilities and perceived capacity to survive transport could shape decisions under pressure, while leaving families with little clarity about the criteria used.

Accounts of staff conduct were likewise divided. Medical workers told investigators that many colleagues worked tirelessly to rescue patients, with some returning to the hospital, but that entire units’ staffs had driven out of the garage and left patients behind. Some nurses were later fired and reported to the nursing board for abandonment. An anonymous doctor also alleged that a military commander involved in the evacuation had identified Arechaga among fourteen patients considered too critical to move, and that medical workers had given those patients morphine before leaving them. The allegation was part of the contested record, not a settled account of every patient’s care.

Toxicology tests on some bodies recovered at Touro and Specialty Hospital of New Orleans found high levels of morphine and midazolam, the same drug combination found in cases at Memorial Medical Center. Those findings added a concrete basis for investigators’ questions, but did not by themselves establish the circumstances or intent behind each patient’s treatment. The state attorney general’s office continued examining Arechaga’s case after the anonymous complaint brought it to official attention.

Public Memory and the Wider Hospital Crisis

Touro’s conflicting stories also shaped how the evacuation was remembered. A hospital archivist, Catherine C. Kahn, later published an account describing staff efforts to rescue everyone. The book notes that Kahn had not been at the hospital during Katrina and apparently did not know about Arechaga. Set beside the anonymous letter and the investigators’ findings, that celebratory version illustrates how institutional accounts can omit a patient whose experience disrupts their conclusion.

The comparison with Charity Hospital sharpens the contrast without making Touro’s circumstances easy to judge. Charity flooded and lost power, plumbing, computers, telephones, and elevators; it had no helipad or corporate overseers, and its evacuation was not complete until Friday afternoon, September 2, a day after Memorial’s. Despite a larger patient population relative to staff, fewer than ten patients died there. Charity workers said they continued caring for patients until the end, even amid reports of a nearby gunman and severe disorder. Their leaders held regular meetings, and staff organized a talent show by flashlight. Touro’s story, set beside that account and the crises at Memorial and Lindy Boggs, shows how outcomes and later explanations differed across hospitals facing extreme conditions.

Touro Infirmary therefore occupies two roles in the book: a hospital whose staff faced genuine failures of infrastructure and danger, and a contested site where claims of complete rescue were challenged by evidence of a living patient left behind. The investigation does not erase the reported efforts of workers who stayed or returned to help. It does, however, make Arechaga’s discovery, the disputed triage accounts, and the toxicology results part of the institution’s public record, where the question of what happened to patients cannot be answered by a single victory narrative.