The Touro Hospital Evacuation and Patients Left Behind was a crisis of failing infrastructure, contested triage, and uneven evacuation during Hurricane Katrina. Touro Infirmary remained reachable by land, unlike Memorial Medical Center and Lindy Boggs Medical Center, yet patients were moved into a part of the building that lost power, some staff reportedly left without them, and investigators later examined allegations that drugs had been given to patients left behind. The discovery and rescue of Odun Arechaga, a seventy-year-old patient found alive after being treated as beyond rescue, made the questions surrounding Touro’s decisions especially difficult to settle.

Infrastructure and the movement of patients

Touro’s staff did not know how high the floodwaters would rise or how quickly. Eighteen critical patients, including Arechaga, were carried from the ground floor to the third floor in the heat. The ground floor still had backup power, but the third floor lost power as generators began to fail. Some of the generators were decades old and had not been tested for prolonged operation; they were also running on fuel that may have been contaminated. In many parts of the hospital, the system was not configured to support air-conditioning, whose chillers depended on the crippled municipal water system.

Ventilator battery backups eventually ran down. Staff then supported some patients by hand, but many did not tolerate being disconnected from the machines and died. The move upward, made in response to uncertainty about rising water, therefore placed highly dependent patients in an area where the conditions needed to sustain their care were deteriorating. Touro’s experience formed part of a wider pattern of hospital crises, but its land access did not spare it from power failure or from the difficult decisions that followed.

Triage, evacuation, and staff departures

Accounts gathered by investigators described a disputed triage practice: some staff said patients who could not state their names were not given intravenous fluids. That allegation troubled relatives of a man with advanced Parkinson’s disease who could not speak and died unexpectedly at the hospital. Other patients were reportedly marked black, a category indicating they were too sick to move, and were not taken to the helipad. These accounts raised questions about how communication ability and medical dependence became factors in deciding who would receive treatment or evacuation.

The response among staff was not uniform. Investigators heard that many workers labored to rescue patients, in some cases returning to the hospital, while entire staffs from some units reportedly drove out through the garage and left patients behind. After the storm, some nurses were fired and reported to the nursing board for abandonment. Touro’s emergency-room nurse Brent Becnel, who had been placed in charge of triage, later recounted that military personnel ordered the remaining staff to leave for their safety and assured them soldiers would stay with roughly two dozen patients. The staff, distressed but believing they had little choice, departed.

A Touro physician later wrote anonymously to the attorney general’s office about a military commander who had supervised the evacuation. The physician said the commander described fourteen patients as too critical to move and alleged that medical workers had given them Morphine and left them behind. 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 used at Memorial Medical Center. The test results documented the drugs’ presence; the competing accounts of why medication was given and what happened to particular patients remained part of the investigation.

Odun Arechaga found alive

Arechaga had suffered a heart attack before the hurricane. While waiting for rescuers who had difficulty locating his home, he lost consciousness and sustained brain damage. Neurologists advised his daughter to allow him to die, but she refused. In the days before the storm he regained the ability to breathe on his own and became somewhat more responsive. His history also included founding the Sabaean Religious Order in Chicago in the 1960s, whose practices he shaped around ancient philosophies and mysteries. He was remembered as a vivid storyteller who wrote and produced elaborate holiday plays about disasters.

On Friday, September 2, witnesses found Arechaga on a gurney on Touro’s third floor, with Styrofoam coffee cups taped over his ears and his medical record at his feet. National Guardsmen wheeled him out and called for medical staff from a smaller hospital across the street. Rescuers treated him, and he opened his eyes as he was loaded into an ambulance. His survival did not erase the danger he had faced; it showed that a patient regarded as too critical to move could still be found alive and treated after leaving Touro.

Investigation and wider comparison

The attorney general’s staff continued examining Arechaga’s case, which had already been raised in a letter to Touro’s chief executive predicting that the truth would eventually emerge. His rescue and the reported decisions to leave patients behind became part of a broader inquiry into evacuation practices, medication, and the responsibilities of staff and military personnel under extreme conditions. The difference between the anonymous physician’s account and the nurse’s account of the final departure illustrates how the same evacuation could be remembered both as an order to abandon patients and as an attempt to protect staff while soldiers stayed behind.

The book places Touro beside Memorial Medical Center, Lindy Boggs Medical Center, and public Charity Hospital, emphasizing that similar emergencies did not produce identical outcomes. Charity Hospital faced flooding, loss of power and basic services, no helipad, and a larger patient population with fewer staff relative to patients; its evacuation was completed on September 2, later than Memorial’s, and fewer than ten patients died there. That comparison does not resolve what happened at Touro. It underscores why the hospital’s equipment failures, evacuation choices, and conflicting accounts required scrutiny beyond the general fact of disaster.