Touro Hospital, known during the disaster as Touro Infirmary, remained reachable by land during Hurricane Katrina, unlike Memorial Medical Center and Lindy Boggs Medical Center. Yet physical access did not ensure that every patient received care or evacuation. Its experience joined two accounts that sit uneasily together: staff members worked under severe constraints to move patients, while investigators heard allegations of abandonment and found drug evidence in some patients’ remains. The contrast is embodied in Odun Arechaga, a seriously ill patient who was left behind and later found alive.

Setting and failing infrastructure

Touro Hospital’s emergency developed as uncertainty about the flooding compounded failures in power and hospital systems. Staff did not know how high the water would rise or how quickly. To move eighteen critical patients away from the ground floor, which still had backup power, they carried them upstairs to the third floor. But that floor lost power as the hospital’s generators began failing. Some generators were decades old; they had not been tested for operation over such an extended period and may have been running on contaminated government fuel. The hospital’s electrical arrangements also left many areas without support for air-conditioning, whose chillers depended on the impaired city water system.

When ventilators’ battery backups ran out, workers had to provide breathing support by hand. Many patients did not tolerate being separated from their machines, and some died. The relocation that had taken vulnerable patients away from rising water therefore brought them into a setting where the systems sustaining them could not reliably function. Touro Hospital remained accessible from outside, but the patients’ dependence on equipment made evacuation and continued treatment urgent and difficult.

Odun Arechaga and the discovery

Arechaga had suffered a heart attack before the hurricane, lost consciousness, and sustained brain damage while rescuers had difficulty reaching his home. Neurologists advised his daughter that he should be allowed to 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 was grave, but it had changed; he was not simply a patient whose prospects had already been settled.

Arechaga was seventy and had founded the Sabaean Religious Order in Chicago in the 1960s. He drew on ancient philosophies and mysteries, described himself as a priest of the Am’n, and wrote elaborate festival plays in which children reenacted disasters such as Sumerian earthquakes and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. That history gives a striking, though not explanatory, resonance to his own experience during Katrina: a storyteller fascinated by catastrophe became one of the people caught inside it.

Witnesses told investigators that on September 2, the day after Memorial Medical Center completed its evacuation, they found Arechaga on a gurney on Touro Hospital’s third floor, with his medical record nearby. United States National Guard members wheeled him out and called for medical workers from a smaller hospital across the street. The rescuers found him in serious respiratory distress and gave him urgent care. He opened his eyes as they placed him in an ambulance. His survival made the episode more than a report of a patient left behind: it established that a person thought to be among those not being evacuated was alive and could still be helped.

Evacuation, staff accounts, and allegations

The investigation found sharply differing experiences among Touro Hospital’s staff. Workers from Touro Hospital and the separately owned Specialty Hospital of New Orleans said that many colleagues labored heroically to rescue patients, in some cases returning to the hospital to help. Other units, however, reportedly had entire staffs drive out of the garage and leave their patients. After the storm, some nurses were fired and reported to the nursing board for abandonment.

An emergency-room nurse later described being placed in charge of triage and said that United States National Guard members arrived near the end of the evacuation. According to his account, they ordered the remaining staff to leave for their own safety and assured them that soldiers would stay to protect roughly two dozen patients who remained. Staff were distressed at leaving, but accepted the order amid fears for their safety. This account presents departure not as a simple choice between indifference and devotion, but as a decision made under pressure, with the promise of protection shaping what workers believed would happen next.

A doctor who wrote anonymously to the Louisiana attorney general’s office gave a darker account. The doctor said a military commander supervising the evacuation had described Arechaga as one of fourteen patients considered too critical to move, and alleged that the patients had been given morphine and left behind. Toxicology tests on some bodies recovered at Touro Hospital and Specialty Hospital of New Orleans found high levels of morphine and midazolam, the same drug combination found in the Memorial investigation. Those results establish the presence of the drugs in the tested remains; they do not, on their own, resolve every question about what happened to each patient or why. The distinction matters in a case where accounts of treatment, evacuation, and abandonment differed.

Competing accounts and aftermath

A published account by Touro Hospital’s archivist portrayed the evacuation as one in which staff rescued every patient, but the book notes that the archivist had not been at the hospital during Katrina and apparently did not know about Arechaga. His case therefore complicates an unqualified success narrative without erasing the substantial work of staff who stayed or returned. The hospital’s story is not reducible either to a claim that everyone was rescued or to the conduct attributed to some units; the surviving evidence describes both care and failure.

Arechaga’s rescue led to a longer aftermath. His longtime friend Nina Levy arranged for him to move to a nursing home near her in Illinois after Katrina. He died on January 13, 2011, more than five years after the evacuation. Touro Hospital’s place in the book rests on the collision between institutional breakdown and individual actions: patients depended on fragile equipment, staff faced competing dangers, and the fate of those left behind could be obscured by broad claims about evacuation. Arechaga’s recovery and later survival made that collision visible.