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Of all the ghosts of Katrina, perhaps the most haunting was the specter of vulnerable residents suffering and dying at home and in hospitals and nursing homes before help arrived. "We got a lot more coming," Saussy told an emergency medical technician there. "We've seen what it looks like when people drown."Īmbulances picked up those residents and took them to the Passenger Terminal. "We're not going to leave people," she said despite the late hour. The program was officially over, but Saussy and her EMS teams pledged to keep it going. They and their families were calling 911, insisting they had registered for the city's special needs transport program, but that help had never arrived. The city's mandatory evacuation program had ended hours earlier, but Saussy was receiving reports that several dozen of the city's sick and elderly were still stranded in their homes.
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on Saturday night, two hours after Gustav's first squall drenched New Orleans, she and other first responders had already spent days helping the city brace for a long, ugly fight with the storm. So as Hurricane Gustav bore down on New Orleans this weekend, I went with Saussy to the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal, the city's designated evacuation point, to get a first-hand look at how much progress had been made.Īt 9:00 p.m. Saussy and other city, state and federal officials vowed the next time would be different. She needed boats and high-water vehicles to respond to the increasingly frantic 911 calls from people threatened by the rising waters. When residents of New Orleans began drowning three years ago, the city's director of Emergency Medical Services, Jullette Saussy, faced a devastating crisis. Editor's note: This story was originally published Tuesday on Salon.