electric mist

Katrina / LSU Triage

When you drive up Nicholson onto the southern end of the LSU campus, rising to your right is the enormous stadium (under even more expansion), with its parking lot a construction lay-down yard. To the left, Alex Box Stadium, with all of the national championships proclaimed proudly on the exterior walls.

If you look a little past the stadium on the right, you'll see the Pete Maravich Center or P-MAC for short. (It's what many of us old LSU grads still refer to simply as the "Assembly" Center.) Its white dome and curved concrete ramps will always hold a special place in my heart -- it's where I officially became an LSU student, years ago. Back before there was computer registration, we all "walked through" registration, where we battled and jockeyed in lines on the floor of the Center to claim a "card" for the class we wanted -- a slender 3 x 7 card with "chads" punched out, indicating the class for which we'd just enrolled. We'd take the cards and climb to the second level and walk around the corridor, stopping at the various tables set up for each task required and then finally, on to pay our fee bill.

It was exciting to be a part of that crowd. It was fresh, it was hope, it was a beginning into all potential. It was a promise of something bigger to come.

Yesterday, Carl and I drove onto campus and parked in the Alex Box parking lot, took the crosswalk and headed back toward the P-Mac. There was the white dome gleaming in spite of being overshadowed by the behemoth stadium. There was the newly renovated Mike-the-Tiger cage, a luxiourious enclosure complete with rocks to climb, a waterfall, a very large pool and plenty of space to run and play. It was a far far cry from the sad little cage he used to have. Good for Mike. Next came the concrete ramps which had long ago made me feel like I had been racing up up up toward a future.

Then there was the fence. A fence. There had never been a hurricane fence preventing access to the ramps. Or military standing outside said fence. So around the P-MAC we went, getting to the LSU campus side, making a sharp left turn to walk up the street. There's a large white posterboard sign on the guard's gate in hasitily written print which says, "Ambulances" and has an arrow.

The P-MAC is still on my left, and now as I look across the fence and beneath the mezzanine, there are tables set up. There are many people who prove to be volunteers behind the tables and many evacuees in front, having just gotten in from New Orleans. There are tables of clothes and shoes (which run out just as soon as the volunteers can get some in), tables of water and food to eat right then, as well as canned goods and other supplies to take with them... for many of them will try to bunk with family for the night, and that family may not even know they're coming. There's a table set up with laptops so the people can send a message.

As we keep moving around the P-MAC, I can tell we're reaching the serious part of this operation, where there are nurses and techs taking medical information, where higher priority (read: in grave danger) patients are taken in immediately to the triage center and where those in dire need but less life-threatening are interviewed by nurses and their stats recorded on brand new files. Nurses and doctors and all sorts of techs ebb and flow through this space. Thre are Guards with guns (wholly over-kill, but they're there). There are volunteers of all shape and sizes -- from LSU students to firemen to police to little grey-haired church ladies.

We sign in at the non-medical volunteer station and go in to see what their needs are. We are there to volunteer our home to medical staff, now that extended family and friends don't need it. We've heard the staff is working twenty-hour shifts and some of them have no place nearby to just crash and relax.

When you walk inside the entrance, you walk down a slight slope until you reach the wide, round base of the P-MAC. Purple seating has been pushed up against the walls. The last time I stood at floor level like that, I was seventeen, and I remember I stood for a moment in awe of the swarm of people, the organized chaos, the feeling of a small city set to work on one task. It was, in many ways, the same. But this time, that small city was made of white temporary screens to give the patients some privacy, there were rows of I.V. bags.

There is a M*A*S*H unit in my campus. A field unit triage on the floor of our basketball arena. There were doctors and nurses and plenty of techs, and helicopters beating overhead and a row of ambulances, sirens blaring, on their way in.

There is a M*A*S*H unit. In Louisiana. In my university.

In the USA.

I am still having a hard time wrapping my mind around the necessity of that. That we had so many people wounded in a major catastrophe, that we've lost an entire city, that we're still finding and rescuing people, six days later. That there are so many families who can't find loved ones, so many families who were crying with gratitude because they were able to put on someone's cast-off shoes.

In the USA.

There in front of me was a little city of survivors, and they were being helped by some of the hardest working people I've ever seen.

To my immediate left was the staging area for the medical supplies, and there were many volunteers working and busy. They were, I learned, completely out of thermometers. I asked the supply person what she had left when I overheard this fact, and she held up a huge thermometer -- the kind they'd use on a cow or something. I think I flinched. I checked out what else they needed and then we went out and bought some thermometers (not an easy find). When I brought them back a dozen later, she practically hugged me and cried. You'd think I had brought her gold.

What concerned me was that all of the supplies were in brown cardboard boxes or black plastic containers, and they were all on the floor. Which, though it wasn't insanitary (they were all individually wrapped), it was an extreme difficulty for the staffers to find anything. I showed Carl.

Carl went to Lowe's, which was closed already. When he explained what he needed and why, they let him in and sold him the wood below cost. He went back today and a wonderful group of New Orleans people who were displaced and staying with family volunteered and helped him build the shelves. They built five large sets, so now most of the supplies are up and organized and easy-to-find.

They were, however, out of thermometers again. They had had five hundred people go through that very morning, and were expected more bus loads that evening, and no more thermometers in the surrounding area to be purchased.

Carl came home with a doctor from Tennessee who'd been working an ungodly amount of hours. He's sleeping now, and will go back on duty in a little while and we hope he makes this his home-away-from-home. I have a friend of Pooks' on her way in -- she's a nurse -- and she'll work from here, too, I hope.

I went back today, to check on the needs, got information, volunteered, saw the shelves Carl had built get put to good use.

There were more helicopters and ambulances when I left. I looked back over my shoulder and saw a helicopter landing on the side, on what I think is the tennis court area.

There is a M*A*S*H unit at my university.. The doctor staying with us said it was now the largest emergency room in the country. And the sad thing is, they think it'll be needed there for three or so more weeks.

I am very proud of all the people working so hard there who are trying to make that possible. Maybe, hopefully, to the people coming in there, the white dome will have been a sign of hope. Of possibility. That there will be a future. I don't know, and I don't know it's enough.

~*~

I took a few photos of the shelves and the triage area. To my knowledge, they weren't letting media in there at all, but they let me take these photos:

The supply situation prior to the shelves.

After the shelves.

Triage during a quiet moment. There are more than 300 beds in this arena, though it's difficult to tell from this angle.

Jake, then Carl, then our wonderful volunteers. I wish I had thought to get everyone's name! If they read this -- thank you!

Posted by toni at September 4, 2005 07:12 PM