NEW ORLEANS – The bodies of more than 40 mostly elderly patients were found in a flooded-out hospital in the biggest known cluster of corpses to be discovered so far in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.
The exact circumstances under which they died were unclear.
The announcement, which could raise Louisiana’s death toll to nearly 280, came as President Bush got his first up-close look at the destruction, and business owners were let back in to assess the damage and begin the slow process of starting over.
Meanwhile, encouraging signs of recovery were all around: Nearly two-thirds of southeastern Louisiana’s water treatment plants were up and running. Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport planned to open to limited passenger service today. And 41 of 174 permanent pumps were in operation, on pace to help drain this still half-flooded city by Oct. 8.
It will be at least three months before New Orleans’ public water system is fully operational, said Sgt. John Zeller, a California National Guard engineer working on the systems.
The bodies were found Sunday at the 317-bed Memorial Medical Center, but the exact number was unclear. Bob Johannesen, a spokesman for the state Department of Health and Hospitals, said 45 patients had been found; hospital assistant administrator David Goodson said there were 44, plus three on the grounds.
Also unclear was exactly how the patients died.
Goodson said patients died while waiting to be evacuated over the four days after the hurricane hit, as temperatures inside the hospital reached 106 degrees.
Steven Campanini, a spokesman for the hospital’s owner, Tenet Healthcare Corp., said some of the patients were dead in the hospital’s morgue before the storm arrived, and none of the deaths resulted from lack of food, water or electricity to power medical equipment. Campanini said many of the patients were seriously ill before Katrina hit.
Bush, in his third visit to New Orleans since the storm, made his first foray to the streets Monday and toured the city for 45 minutes aboard the back of a truck, forcing him at times to duck to avoid low-hanging electrical wires and branches.
He disputed suggestions that the government responded sluggishly because the victims were mostly poor and black.
“The storm didn’t discriminate and neither will the recovery effort,” the president said. “When those Coast Guard choppers, many of whom were first on the scene, were pulling people off roofs, they didn’t check the color of a person’s skin.”
Insurance experts have doubled to at least $40 billion their estimate of insured losses caused by Katrina. Risk Management Solutions Inc. of Newark, Calif., put the total economic damage at more than $125 billion.
FEMA expects to be providing temporary housing for about 200,000 hurricane victims for up to five years, most of them in Louisiana. It plans to use trailer homes to create “temporary cities,” some with populations up to 25,000, said Brad Fair, head of the FEMA housing effort.
He had no cost estimates.
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