By LARA JAKES JORDAN
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Federal plans to help evacuate the elderly and ill from a disaster do not cover nursing home patients and provide inadequate transportation, congressional investigators reported Thursday.
In response, the Pentagon and Homeland Security Department said state and local officials are responsible for planning the evacuations of hospitals and nursing homes.
Before Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last Aug. 29, hospital and nursing facility administrators faced the dilemma of whether to evacuate patients whose health could be worsened by a move.
Under the national response plan for emergencies, the government has the power to step in when state and local officials are overwhelmed. But the plan addresses evacuation procedures for hospitals, not nursing homes, according to the Government Accountability Office.
In addition, the response plan does not provide for ambulances or helicopters to evacuate patients from facilities. Instead, the guidelines begin to apply at a mobilization center, such as an airport, and only after patients have been moved.
“This report outlines gaps in our disaster response system which may have contributed to some of the unconscionable situations during Katrina in which nursing home residents and hospital patients were not evacuated,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who ordered the investigation.
“These residents and patients relied on others for their care, safety and security,” Grassley said. “That is why, at all levels, local, state, and federal, we must be prepared to respond effectively in the aftermath of a natural or manmade disaster.”
At least 40 bodies, many of them elderly patients, were found inside a flooded New Orleans hospital after Katrina hit. Also, 34 patients at a nursing home near New Orleans died in the wake of massive flooding brought by the storm’s surge. The nursing home’s owners were charged with negligent homicide for failing to evacuate the patients.
Homeland Security and Pentagon officials, in their responses to the report by the investigative arm of Congress, noted that the response plan gives state and local officials the job of evacuating people.
“You might better describe the limitations and/or deficiencies as those of state and local government,” wrote Assistant Defense Secretary William Winkenwerder.
Steven J. Pecinovsky of the Homeland Security Department said the federal government “only becomes involved when the capabilities of the state and local governments are overwhelmed.” He said the department will take the recommendations under advisement.