St. Bernard on the mend after Katrina

• By ALLEN M. JOHNSON JR.
• Advocate New Orleans bureau
• Published: Jul 27, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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‘They didn’t expect me to live,” 73-year-old Douglas “Duddy” Couture says of the doctors who put five stints in his heart in July 2005 — the month before Hurricane Katrina.

Aided by “angels” in north Louisiana, the ailing fisherman and his wife, Sharon, survived three subsequent years of storm-related evacuation, recovery and reconstruction of their bayou home in St. Bernard Parish.

But now, after all that, they recently moved to Picayune, Miss.

“We’re out because Duddy’s health is the main thing,” Sharon Couture said.

Dr. Cathi Fontenot, interim CEO of the LSU-run Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans, sums up post-Katrina health care in the metro area with a medical metaphor: “We’re off life support but we’re still in ICU.”

Almost three years after Katrina, amid signs the depopulated parish is rebounding, there is still no hospital to replace the flood-ruined Chalmette Medical Center.

Hospitals in neighboring New Orleans and St. Tammany Parish are either too far away or overwhelmed with patients, residents and officials say.

“If you had a heart attack, it would take you 30 minutes to get to a hospital from here — if you had an ambulance already outside,” Chalmette High School Principal Wayne Warner said.

That may soon change.

The parish has committed $25 million toward a new hospital, according to newly elected Parish President Craig Taffaro. Members of a hospital service district created after the storm will meet this week in an old FEMA trailer to announce bid specifications for the community hospital, parish officials say.

But the shortage of physicians and medical care remains dire, by most accounts. The hospital issue proved critical for the Coutures.
They say their new home in Picayune is a 35-minute drive from a hospital in Gulfport. It took almost twice that long from their old home in Yscloskey to hospitals in the New Orleans area.

During Katrina, all but five of the 27,000 structures in the parish were destroyed by the storm surge and by flood waters unleashed by broken levees. The storm killed more than 100 people, who are memorialized at Shell Beach.

About 64,700 people lived in St. Bernard Parish before Katrina hit, according the U.S. Census. Taffaro estimates 35,000 to 37,000 have returned.