Original subtitles

- [Woman] Charity Hospital was the landmark

of the whole city,

and people knew they were safe when they went there.

They knew we would take care of 'em.

- [Woman] The hospital was legendary.

Everybody knows who Charity is.

(gentle piano music)

- [Man] There was a long legacy that took care of her people

regardless of their ability to pay.

- [Woman] It's like a spiritual feeling

when you're in that building.

It's something walking the halls of that hospital.

- [Man] But as the storm hit, I have no doubts

that miracles were happening inside that hospital.

- [Man] Within two weeks after Katrina,

we had over 200 military personnel cleaning

and making Charity Hospital operational again.

- [Man] It was ready to receive patients,

and I know for fact that we needed that hospital.

- [Man] Something's being hid inside this hospital,

no doubt about it.

(siren blaring)

- [Doctor] On the count of three, one, two, three.

(people chattering)

What's your name? - Dale.

- Dale? - Dale Green.

I was leaving out of this hallway right here.

I'm walking down the steps,

a guy across the street came from over,

came out with a mask on his face

and told me to stop and don't move.

I saw he had an AK-47 in his hand.

And as he was approaching me, he was shooting.

(gunshots firing)

- [Man] There it is, we have a GSW to the right mid-back.

- [Doctor] Go flat, please, on three, one, two, three.

(Dale yelling)

- He shot me.

I'm gonna be in Charity.

He doing good for me.

He saved my life.

- People call it Big Charity.

I also think it's like Mother Charity.

- It was the heartbeat for the city of New Orleans.

- Didn't matter if somebody had insurance

or didn't have insurance.

We're there to treat people and save lives.

- Charity Hospital was the lifeblood of the city

of New Orleans.

- Charity Hospital gave birth to most

of the citizens of New Orleans,

and gave life to many dying people here.

She stood by their side.

She was here when we came into the world.

She was here when a lot of us left.

If there's something to be called your mother,

it was Charity Hospital.

That's our mama.

- [Woman] Charity Hospital was the oldest continuing

operating hospital in the United States.

- [Man] It was made on the bequeath of a merchant who died

and said, "I wanna leave this money to care

"for those people who don't have the means

"to care for themselves otherwise."

And so that's the long legacy of that hospital

to provide for indigents.

(gentle reminiscing piano music)

- [Man] It was 1927 that the big hospital,

we all lovingly called Big Charity, was started.

It was one of the largest, if not the largest,

hospital in the world.

- [Reporter] The new Charity Hospital,

an imposing structure built with state and federal funds

obtained during Huey Long's regime,

is operated by the state and contains free clinics

for all races, regardless of color or creed.

- It was the donors of Charity that provided

the nursing care, and for a long time ran the hospital.

- We started the School of Nursing,

and that became a very prominent school.

- They did the nursing care, they kept the books,

and they even cleaned the floors.

So everybody became very close to the daughters

of Charity, because they'd roll up their sleeves

with their habits on, and they did whatever was necessary

to keep the hospital going.

- When I left Charity, I was 80 years old.

That was 14 years ago.

I'm now 94.

- They were strict, but they were calm and gentle,

and they ran a good ship, they did.

- When you walked into Charity Hospital,

you knew why you were there.

And there were the spirits of the healers

that had come before you, and that you'd better turn out

as humble and as kind and as loving

as the ones who walked before you.

- You are taught to treat people the way

you wanna be treated, and that's the spirit.

It's about love.

It's about love.

That's the culture of the hospital.

- And they had a sign that was placed up by the lobby,

where the unusual occur and miracles happen.

And miracles happen all of the time.

I saw them happen.

- Daughters of Charity, which ran the system

for over 200 years, turned it over

to the State of Louisiana.

In the late '90s, Louisiana State University

took over control.

So within the LSU system, the Chancellor has

overall management of Charity Hospital.

- Charity was really a mecca for education.

It was a great place to see a lot of diseases

and learn a lot from a lot of different patients.

Over the course of the years,

because of the relative decrease in funding,

the bed sizes contracted, and so it's not been

exactly the same experience today.

- And one of the things the LSU system realized,

the doctors were dedicated, the nurses were dedicated,

but let's not fool ourselves.

The patients were in there, 10 to a ward,

one bathroom shared by a ward,

no real places to have a conversation in private.

I mean, all kinds of things were wrong with it.

And I'm talking about just from

a patient-centered point-of-view.

Did that necessarily affect the outcomes, no.

Did it keep people from learning, no.

But is it ideal?

No.

- The facility may have been old,

but the care that was offered there was the best.

We would see about 200,000 ER visits a year.

Outpatient visits were nearly a half million.

It was one of the busiest ERs in the country.

It was the safety net hospital for the state of Louisiana.

- Nobody asked you, you know, "Can you pay?

"Do you have money?"

That's not the first questions that come out of your mouth.

As it is, you can't get through

an emergency department visit without being asked,

"Show me your insurance card.

"How do you plan on paying for this visit?"

And that's something that we've never ascribed to.

- The vast majority of the uninsured ended up

in the Charity Hospital system.

Because it was public, and Louisiana being a poor state,

it was a system that was very resource-restrained.

So, we often couldn't pay as well

as our competitors in the marketplace,

couldn't staff at the numbers,

certainly didn't have the physical plan

that other institutions in the community had.

- The problem with Charity Hospital as a building

is that the state failed to put money back into it

to maintain it, because their focus was

to move towards a new facility, a new hospital,

and have a new mission, which would be a hospital

that catered to both public and private.

So for years, LSU and the state had been planning

to develop a new hospital.

And in July of 2005, they presented those plans

to the state legislature.

But there was no money, and then a month later, Katrina hit.

(thunder crashing and rain falling)

- This storm had a different feeling.

It wasn't like the storms we dealt with before.

- It was in the middle of the Gulf,

maybe a few hundred miles off Louisiana.

It was a Cat 5 at that time.

- [Man] Prior to landfall, there was an eerie quietness

that came over the entire city.

There were no birds chirping,

there was no traffic on the highway,

the city was just quiet.

- [Doctor] We had triaged out as many patients as we could,

but there were a few hundred patients

remaining in the hospital that couldn't be moved out.

And we prepared to defend in place.

- [Man] This massive concrete building,

you could actually feel it vibrating in the wind.

- After the storm and around 3 in the afternoon,

we actually walked around.

We went out and surveyed the hospital

and then headed back at about 6 p.m.

- [Woman] 2, 3 in the morning, something like that,

the night shift woke us up.

We had gotten news that the levees had broke,

and that New Orleans was flooding.

- [Man] Somebody woke me up and I jumped up

and the first thing I grabbed was a damn camera, you know?

And I'm running down the stairs, you can see

there's over five feet of water in the basement area,

and it's still rising.

Then there was a sinkhole that broke through,

right outside the emergency ramp,

sucking water in even faster.

- And within that basement is a conduit for power,

as well as our own plumbing.

- [Woman] We brought everything to the second floor

auditorium, and that's where we set up our emergency room.

- [Woman] Nurses cared for patients on their knees.

- [Man] It was a Monday night

when the second generator went out.

We were plunged into darkness.

- One of our nurses came in and shook me awake

early Tuesday morning and said,

"Dr. Berggren, look out the window."

- [Woman] Then it was a lake around Charity.

You couldn't get in or out.

- [Doctor] Now all of a sudden we had a hospital full

of critically ill patients with no water,

no electricity, no laboratory, no x-ray,

no anything.

- I think all of our impression

is if a natural disaster were to occur,

that we would give it about 48 hours,

and then the federal government would clearly come in,

and we would be stabilized, rescued.

That's not true.

72 hours turned into 96 hours,

and there was still no definitive hope.

- I remember seeing someone from Governor Blanco's office

come out and say, "Hospitals have been evacuated,

"you know, getting people to safety."

But almost simultaneously, I was getting these emails

on my Blackberry from doctors and other healthcare people

in the hospital saying, "We're still here.

"We haven't been evacuated.

"And the worst part of all is that they think we're gone."

So I literally convinced a helicopter pilot

to fly me in.

And there were people who were pleading for their lives

by hanging a sheet outside the window

and hoping someone sees it in the bright sunlight.

- We took big sheets.

We were all signing our names.

Said, "We're still here."

"The spirit of Charity lives on."

- So this is what Charity Hospital looks like

in the middle of a natural disaster.

We're in Downtown New Orleans.

This is actually an auditorium that we're standing in now.

I'd never seen anything quite like that.

They were trying to cycle people on and off

the breathing machines and have people Ambu bag

when they weren't on the machine.

- We had a ventilator patient, he's laying there,

I'm bagging him, and they called us over

to do something else for another patient,

and he looked up at me and he went,

and he grabbed the bag and he started bagging himself.

- I mean, some of these folks were cramping up,

you know, from pumping for so long,

providing basic for people that should've died.

And I'm not talking one day,

and I'm not talking a few hours,

we talking five days after the hurricane already hit

that life was still being sustained.

- Saw Tulane Hospital across the street, they evacuated.

But it was their hospital that did all the evacuating.

We were waiting for the state.

And we were saying, "Wow, what about us?"

- [Man] The National Guard truck was pushing a wave

down the street, he pulled over,

and some of the guys and they asked them,

"Can you help us?"

- We were trying to transport some

of the very acute patients to Tulane Hospital.

They had a helipad set up, and we were trying

to get our sickest patients out.

- I see dozens of Black Hawk helicopters flying around now,

and nobody seems to know that we have a need

to get these critically ill patients outta here.

- [Man] We watch as medical personnel at Tulane

were picked up by helicopters, while Charity's patients,

some on ventilators, were being worked by hand pumps

waited in this parking garage.

- I'm not sure what was happening,

but the fact of the matter is in medicine,

we have a pretty clear triage, you know,

sickest patients go first.

It just makes perfect sense and it works.

And that's not what was happening here.

What's gonna happen to some of these patients

if you don't get them outta here?

- Two of them have already died here on this ramp,

waiting to get out.

- Two died? - In this very spot.

- [Sanjay] Two died here because you couldn't get out?

- Two died here because we could not get them out.

- [Man] There was gun play in the neighborhood,

and so it was deemed unsafe to transport more patients

to the Tulane rooftop, and so that was shut down.

- So many of my coworkers didn't know

if their families survived.

They'd had no idea where anybody was.

- [Woman] We could not order x-rays or CAT scans,

or electrolyte levels.

And so we had to really rely on physical diagnosis.

- I didn't realize how we had coated

all of our patients in this veneer of technology,

which had sort of isolated us from them.

When all of that was peeled away,

it was miraculous how intimate the environment became,

how meaningful touch became,

how meaningful a calm voice became.

- That old-fashioned medicine, less tests,

fewer medications, more, you know,

sitting down and talking to people.

Lot of it was hugs, words of reassurance.

Maybe it was medicine the way medicine was intended to be.

- These nurses, these doctors, these clerks,

they seem like they had the gift of life in their hands.

When they touched somebody, it was just reassuring them,

"I'm going to live, I'm not going to die here today."

- We had made up our minds that we came in here together

and we gonna leave together.

It was that spirit that came up.

In my dowdy uniform with Charity Hospital insignia on it,

but nobody abandoned their patients.

It became like a spiritual bond.

- Dear Heavenly Father, we thanks that you strengthen us.

We ask that you touch our hearts,

let us know that you are the one to rescue us.

My child I have not forgotten you.

With the voice in our body for the goal,

with the breath that we have left,

if it's our last, we will say thank you.

And we continue, each one of us, in our own way,

and as one, standing together, all on one accord.

We know no other words to say but thank you.

Amen, amen, and amen.

- We had a nurse here named T who taught us a song,

and the words of the song are I need you,

you need me, we're all a part of God's body.

♫ It is his will

♫ That every being be somebody

♫ I need you

♫ You need me

♫ We're all a part of God's body

♫ I love you

♫ I need you to survive

♫ You are important to me

♫ I need you to survive

- It was on the Wednesday after when I spoke with my mother.

First thing, I'd called her first thing in the morning.

Her first words were that "Your children are okay,

"and your house is okay."

So, it was quite a good day for me.

I was just elated.

It was amazing.

And at that point is when my mother said,

"Your dad is on his way there,

"and he's gonna get you out."

And I said, "Oh no, no, don't let him come,

"it's not safe in the city."

She said, "No, he's coming, he's coming to get you."

- I was there by my office,

which is in the front of the hospital.

I saw two boats, two flat boats coming up.

This man yelled out, "I came to get my daughter."

- Someone came and said, "There's some guy in a boat

"on the front steps looking for you." (laughs)

And I thought, "Oh my gosh, he did, he made it here."

- She was surprised to see me.

- I was very surprised.

It was very emotional, I still get very emotional,

as you can see.

He said, "Get in the boat, we're going home."

And I said, "No, I can't, I can't leave."

I whispered it to him, because I felt so bad

that he had made that effort to come all the way down

there to get me.

I couldn't leave.

There was too much, you know, the patients were there,

the staff was there.

It was a responsibility that I took,

and I wasn't gonna leave that.

- Then I realized it was the thing to do,

she couldn't leave.

But I realized, too, I had to get them out of there.

By the time I got halfway to Baton Rouge,

my cell phone would work.

I called my friend, the state senator.

Standing on the side of the state senator

was the second in command of the enforcement branch

of the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission.

- [Woman] These air boats came down the street

and got us out of there.

- And man, I'll tell you what,

I have to commend the Wildlife and Fisheries.

Those men worked their tails off, all day long,

to get every patient out of Charity Hospital.

- Just to see God was carrying patients from the 12th floor.

The strength mentally, and the determination,

we're gonna take care.

It was like watching a war movie

and now we beginning to win.

We were losing, now we're winning.

And everybody just cheering them on,

"Yay, go get 'em!"

- This is one of our patients, he's in the staging area,

and I looked at him, I said, "We're going!"

And he just raised his arms and I took his picture.

- There was a banner I wrote.

The banner reads CHNO, Charity Hospital New Orleans, 1,

Katrina, 0.

We are winning the battle.

Last thing I remember is sitting on the boat,

looking behind me as the sun's setting,

and knowing that at this point, all the patients are gone.

And then, you know, this place may never be reopened.

This might be the last hurrah for Charity Hospital.

(dramatic music)

- [Man] The military went into Charity Hospital

and they begin cleaning it up.

- Out of every structure that we've been able to assess

came up with Charity Hospital as being the best opportunity

to regain medical infrastructure in New Orleans.

- We had the decontamination team.

We had initial clean-up team.

Then the 82nd Airborne came.

Two whole companies.

We had the Navy there.

We had myself and my contingent of National Guardsmen.

- Members of the active component, Army,

the USS Iwo Jima Fire Control team.

We had a professional engineer, electrical engineer on site.

- We called and wanted to know what can we do to help.

What needed to be done?

And they said that we could go downtown

and help with the clean-up of the hospital and all,

that it needed to get cleaned up, to get patients.

- We met at a meeting point at a McDonald's

in Jefferson Highway.

The military escorted us in,

and then we went to the hospital to help them clean up.

- There were doctors that I met

that were part of the clean-up efforts.

These were residents in the ER and surgery

who came back and helped clean up the hospital.

You had people in there who really thought,

"You know what, we're getting our Charity Hospital back."

- They wanted the first, second, and third floor done

so they could be there for people who come in,

and starting to get to work.

And then the dude paid, and then the dude had to do

with the people, 'cause people needed Charity Hospital.

- [Man] The only caveat was that the basement

should be pumped dry and there needed to be an assessment

of what was in the basement.

- I could hear some pumps going.

So I walk down the street and lo and behold,

they got some Germans pumping out the Superdome,

the parking lot.

I said, "Come with me."

So I took the head of them over to Charity Hospital.

- The fire brigade, the German fire brigade,

dumped their hoses into the basement and began pumping.

I still, to this day, don't know how a German fire brigade

was in New Orleans, but hey, you know,

I wasn't gonna turn it down.

- Bam, it happened.

They brought two pumps over.

These were four-inch pumps.

These was you whomp and the stuff was out of there

in a day and a half.

We started decontaminating Charity Hospital.

And they went through and they scrubbed stuff out.

Then they came back with the water trucks,

and rinsed everything down.

And then we pumped it all out again.

After the decam left, then the regular guys,

the regular Joes would come in and clean again.

- It was ready to go.

I mean, we had hundreds of troops in there.

And we know how to do this.

- So the place was powered, occupiable,

according to the US Navy OSHA standards

and their testing.

It was cleaned, there wasn't any trash to worry about.

The basement was pumped completely dry.

The sump pumps were operating just fine.

We were ready to operate on the day

that all that came together.

- The hospital was cleaner than it had ever been

in the time that I worked there.

The hospital looked great.

- Spotless, spotless.

Beds were made, gowns were on, waiting for patients.

And we showed up in uniforms and said, "Let's go,

"we're ready to go to work."

- And when we told the state we were ready

to open the hospital, this was no joke.

I mean, we carry with us the experts to test there,

to test for mold, and,

we had decon teams in there.

We had people who knew what were doing.

And when I reported it to the state and said,

"Hey, the hospital's clean.

"If you want to open it, we can do it right now."

And then I was told they don't plan to reopen it.

(sad, wistful music)

- The word that we got was that the governor

had condemned the hospital.

And we hadn't seen anybody come out.

We were the only ones at the hospital.

Nobody had come and inspected it

while we were standing there.

And we were there the whole time.

Somebody was there 24 hours a day.

My God, you don't even wanna come out here

and talk to us and find out what we see

and what we know needs to happen,

because we're here now?

I ain't got a dog in this fight, people,

I'm not from New Oreeans, I'm from Los Angeles.

- I was given a directive from out of the

administrative headquarters office in Baton Rouge.

"Board it up and seal it up

"and not allow anyone into the hospital.

"Either do this or lose your job."

- Word just came down for us

to leave the building immediately,

to get off of the property.

- The LSU system leadership had planned to move

to a new facility pre-Katrina.

In July 2005, two months before Katrina,

they had pitched their proposal to the state legislature,

who loved the idea and said, "Yeah, this is great,

"but we don't have $800 million to build it."

Then Katrina hit in August 2005.

It was the perfect storm.

LSU decided we're gonna keep the doors closed at Charity

and FEMA's gonna buy our new hospital.

- So there was an attempt to clean it up

as quickly as we can, and so forth.

The problem was the whole facility was not

in a state that would be approved by the Joint Commission.

- Well, I was one of the first officials to ask

to see Charity.

I was told no at first.

I was told it was too dangerous.

And I said, "Well, I still wanna see it."

And they said, "Well, we've gotta suit you up.

"You gotta wear one of these white spacesuits,"

and worried about contamination, and I said,

"I'll take my chances."

I got down there, I had two of my colleagues with me.

They probably had 20 folks from LSU.

I insisted on seeing every floor.

And the building was fine.

The basement had flooded, but it had been cleaned out.

And it was clear to me at that point

that a decision had been made,

not on the basis of healthcare,

but on the basis of other considerations,

not to reopen the Big Charity.

Well I think the feeling was that,

in fact one of the officials told me,

"If we open it back up, we may never get a new hospital."

And that's not a legitimate consideration, in my opinion,

not when you've got people that need healthcare,

and not when you're spending taxpayer dollars.

- The old Charity building was not suitable

for modern healthcare.

So the planning for a different facility had been going on

for several years prior to Katrina.

One of the difficulties that was preventing

the moving ahead in building the facility

was the funding aspects.

- FEMA said that for $26 million,

the building could be reopened.

We appealed, came back at $16 million,

so that the dial went south,

And we expected it to go way north.

And then began the long drawn-out battle with FEMA

to replace Big Charity.

- Wow, they are using this tragedy,

this disaster, as an opportunity to get something

to fulfill an agenda.

- [Woman] We set up tents in the parking lot

and worked there.

- We were seeing 60 patients a day,

all managed in a parking lot with back-up generators

and artificial water supply.

And porta-lights.

- We're nothing but tents.

And then we went to the convention center.

- [Reporter] Emergency medical doctors who used to work

at Charity are now seeing patients in Hall J

of the convention center.

They are not equipped to see people with major injuries,

severe heart attacks and strokes, or pregnancy care.

There is a shortage of hospital beds in the entire area.

- But the city of New Orleans had to get on

with its business of conventions, and said,

"We need you to move."

- So six months after Katrina, with no place to go,

the best we could come up with was renovating

the Lord & Taylor department store.

And that was our outpatient clinics

and emergency room for the Charity system.

You go up the escalator to lingerie

and you realize that's where dental chairs are,

and x-ray equipment is.

So we called all of our interim facilities

The Spirit of Charity.

- Now we're talking about 120 patient visits a day.

Pretty relentless.

We're constantly trying to clean it out

and it's adjacent to a food court that was dirty

and had not been cleaned.

Because of the food and everything that was there,

there were far too many rats to deal with.

It was incredibly frustrating,

because we felt we were on a path

to not necessarily open the whole hospital,

but open a component of the hospital

that could deliver healthcare better than a tent.

- It would have served a purpose as a bridge.

Having a central nucleus for care,

we don't have to admit them, for just basic emergency care,

it would've allowed them to continue with their plan.

But I think it would've risked FEMA reimbursement

and they couldn't afford that.

- Charity couldn't be opened as an interim facility

because once you opened it as an interim facility,

it was an admission that the building wasn't destroyed.

Then you lost all rights to ever argue

that the replacement value was what was owed.

- I understand that there's business

and I understand that there's politics.

But there's not,

it doesn't make any sense to me

because it wasn't what was best for the people.

- In April of 2006,

remember the storm was in August of 2005,

April 2006, a doctor in New Orleans could not order

a test for tuberculosis.

I would've had to put the patient on a bus,

where he would cough, and send him to Baton Rouge.

I've worked in many developing countries.

I grew up in Haiti, I worked in Gabon.

In the most resource-limited of settings,

you can do a basic microscope test to diagnose tuberculosis,

and not put a whole bunch of other people at risk

in the meantime.

- People who said, "Oh, I don't need a colonoscopy now,"

"I don't need cancer screening now,"

"I don't need my mammogram now,"

"I'll put it off once the hospital's back."

And so their risk for cancer, their risk for heart disease,

vascular disease, is greater.

- Well, ultimately, will in some opinions, some ways,

kill people, yeah.

It's not gonna be like the dam bust

and you know, a thousand people die.

What's gonna happen is the same number,

if not more people, are gonna die

because they didn't get access, they didn't seek care.

They felt uncomfortable where they were told

that they would now be going.

So they just deferred it.

(people chanting) (whistle blowing)

- So about seven months after Katrina,

we had our first rally to reopen Charity Hospital.

I was on the list of speakers.

The LSU leadership made it clear

that I was not to speak at that rally,

or my contract would be in jeopardy.

It goes against what university principles are all about.

Not just free speech, but to invoke new ideas.

That's what we try to do with our students.

That's how you build leaders.

And here they were squashing that.

So I resigned.

You know, there are some things in life

that are important enough that you have to take a stand.

- Save! - Charity!

- Save! - Charity!

- Save! - Charity!

- [Doctor] The Foundation for Historical Louisiana was able

to commission one of the leading architectural firms

to see if Charity Hospital could be restored

and reopened as a state-of-the-art hospital.

- The seventh largest architectural firm in the world

designed a beautiful concept plan that showed

that we could get everything they wanted in, perfectly,

and every room was a private room.

We would gut it and build

a state-of-the-art hospital inside.

Using the buildings around Charity Hospital

as the ancillary buildings.

We'd save 34% in the construction costs, alone.

We could finish in three years of construction time.

That would've been three to four years ahead

of what the schedule is right now.

When we released the study they said we were wrong

and that we can't possibly be right.

- I mean, this place, all the doors,

this place is locked up like Fort Knox right now.

Something's being hid inside this hospital.

No doubt about it.

A building that's functional as a hospital.

Over the months, I went back in several times

and with each subsequent visit,

the hospital was in more disarray.

There was more manmade intentional damage.

- As our services expanded, we would go back to get

more and more supplies.

Each and every time we went back to Charity,

it looked like a new hurricane

had come through the building.

I can only guesstimate what happened

and the reasons that it happened,

and I don't think I'll go into that.

- Trash throughout the place.

That happened three or four days after we were outta there.

Equipment being upside down and turned over,

equipment not where we left it,

like medical equipment being literally up-ended

and nothing was up-ended in that place.

- I remember I was approached by an emergency room doctor

from Charity Hospital, and he initially asked me

to escort he and his party over to the hospital.

And as we were going up, I remember we saw water.

We followed that stream of water into a bathroom

on the fourth floor, and we found that the water

had been left running.

There were a couple of towels in the sink,

you know, stopping up the drain.

And the water made its way all the way out into the hallway

and was actually draining down the stairwell.

- We started hearing water falling in the elevator shaft.

But then we started getting water in the elevators.

These faucets were off, and then we came shortly after

and they're on.

We had quite a few on the 13th floor

where there was no access for the public to go in

because you had to have a key,

and we had to use our keys to get in there

to turn those waters off.

- It was all an intentional effort.

A decision was made somewhere higher up

to scuttle Charity and to have a new hospital.

Scuttling is a maritime term,

when you take a ship out and sink it intentionally.

And so I think it applies well in this case.

I've never begrudged the desire to have a new hospital.

But in the fashion they achieved their goal,

it's very immoral and unethical,

and probably criminal.

- I think there is a risk that every one of us

that has talked to you will end up,

I mean I found out real quick.

If you don't say the right thing, do the right thing,

somebody wants to go in a different direction

and it's political, then they'll be done with you

in a heartbeat.

- I can't talk about that.

I can't do it.

Trying to see how I can give you an answer to that

without saying that.

Mm-mm, there's nothing I'll be able to say

that will paint them in anything other than an awful light,

and that'll come back to me.

So I prefer not to do that.

- I know of several people who were told

not to talk about Charity Hospital.

I was personally standing next to one of the doctors,

and point-blank he was told,

and I was standing less than four, five feet away from him,

if he knew what was good for him, he would let it drop.

And the gentleman walked away.

- Some of the doctors got together

and started cleaning up the hsospital.

And it could,

I don't know if I should say any more that.

- The word was put out that if you buck their efforts,

that you would no longer be needed.

- The guy goes, "If any more of you all get on camera,

"or try to set up healthcare down here,"

he said, "I'll make sure you never work

"in this state again."

- You can keep arguing about it,

but you're not helping the cause,

because the more you keep complaining and keep saying,

"We could've gone back in there,"

it confuses people.

The decision has been made, we're not going back in there.

That's not suitable for the future.

Let's get off of that and move forward.

- Ultimately a decision was made to rehab

University Hospital at that point,

with the idea being that it was gonna be a bridge

to a new facility.

- Charity was a much larger facility.

But in effect, what we ended up trying to do

is to shove all of the patients that we used to handle

between University and Charity

into just University Hospital.

We were on diversion almost every day of the week.

Diversion means that we're not able

to accept incoming people.

We can't take new patients off of the street,

because all of the facilities in the hospital

are completely filled up.

So once the hospital's filled up, where do you go?

There are consequences on many levels.

After the storm there was no place

for the mentally ill to go.

- Charity Hospital, the third floor of the hospital,

was equipped with a crisis intervention unit,

which could house as many as 50 acute care psych patients,

and house approximately 100 in-patient

psychiatric patients.

- And I can tell you the third floor was fine,

because I saw it.

I don't know what it looks like today, but I saw it.

And we should've at least opened up the third floor

to give some relief to these psych patients.

- It's very difficult right now.

I mean, it's in the newspapers as we speak, right now.

Where can we treat all of the psychiatric patients?

- Hi, I'm Cecile Tebo and I'm the administrator

for the NOPD Crisis Unit.

The Crisis Unit's responsibilities were to respond

to 911 calls involving people having a mental health crisis.

We would roll up to Big Charity,

which just had a wonderful process and system

for dealing with the chronically mentally ill,

because they saw many a day.

In the dead of night, the doors are locked?

Where do we go now?

We're able to get them off the bridge,

but where do we go?

We'd see the same people, over and over again.

Sometimes they'd just been there that morning

and we were bringing them back that afternoon.

That didn't happen

when we had Charity.

So the jail has become our largest

mental health provider in the state.

- We've had a number of deaths of people

who should've been in the hospital,

and instead they were in the jail,

which is not equipped to provide adequate mental healthcare.

- The suicide rate went up five-fold

and then a lot of people just went without care.

A lot.

I don't know the number, but a lot,

'cause they would end up in our emergency room,

and they were people that should've been institutionalized.

- As a result of the closure of that hospital,

and the result of the closure of those beds,

I can't tell you many lives we've lost.

- I had been telling people

that we have ticking time bombs out there,

and it is simply a matter of time

before someone

or many get seriously, seriously injured.

(sirens blaring)

A devastating day for the New Orleans police department,

as one of their own is murdered with her own gun.

- Bernel Johnson, who killed Nicola Cotton,

we'd just picked him up weeks prior.

And he was released from the hospital

into the streets of New Orleans,

and a couple of days later, Nicola was dead.

Along with her eight week-old unborn child.

And those stories continue to still be happening.

- We are at another crime scene in New Orleans.

A young mother needed services.

She needed help.

She's reached out for help,

and the help wasn't there to assist her.

I can't imagine, but it got so bad in that apartment

that she had access to a firearm and she took the life

of one of her children with the firearm,

then she took the life of the other child

by drowning the other child.

When you close Big Charity,

when you close mental health services,

when you take them and you move them someplace else,

people who are living in this community,

they don't have access.

Those two children, we let them down,

and they paid for it with their lives.

- Without a doubt, I believe that the loss of Charity

resulted in the loss of life for those

who are not able to get treatment for their mental illness.

Absolutely.

♫ If we ever needed Charity before

♫ Sure do need it now

♫ Yes we sure do need it now

♫ Oh we sure do need it now

♫ Hey if we ever needed Charity before

♫ We sure do need it now

♫ We need it to make our city whole

- Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor!

Open up this facility now!

What a picture you present here tonight,

not only to this city but to the world

and to the knightdom, that we will rebuild Charity Hospital.

Come on, let me here you say it!

Open up! - Open up!

- Charity! - Charity!

- It was really a terrible time for the region.

Citizens of New Orleans had virtually no healthcare,

and the federal government was only gonna reimburse

the state a very modest amount of money

for basically losing the use of that building.

So finally, I literally had to pass an Act of Congress,

create an arbitration panel,

and lo and behold, when we presented our evidence,

and I say the state,

the federal government basically wrote a check

for the full amount, and the state decided

to build a new facility.

- First assessment of Charity Hospital was 26 million.

Isn't that amazing?

A hospital that's damaged for only 26 million,

now be four 400-and-something million dollars,

that is a question I would love to know the answer to.

- Everybody from every corner was coming out

trying to influence FEMA with the final report.

What's it gonna be?

Some of that's legitimate and some of it isn't.

But it ultimately came down that it needed to be replaced.

- When FEMA gave LSU the money, that's when I realized

that if you're big enough in this state,

you can break the rules.

(crowd chattering)

- One, two, three.

(audience applauding)

Welcome to this historic day

of graduate medical education.

As we celebrate the start of construction

of the University Medical Center.

- [Woman] Essentially it's two mega hospitals.

30 acres for the VA and 30 acres for LSU site,

in the middle of lower mid-city historic neighborhood.

- It was all working people.

It was people had come back,

they had struggled to rebuild their homes.

And I had a terrible feeling these people

are gonna be wiped out.

They're going to be bulldozed

and they're not even gonna know what hit 'em.

- My name is Wallace Thurman.

I live at 217 South Tonti Street, New Orleans, Louisiana.

- My Shelia Davis Joseph.

I live at 2430 Cleveland Avenue.

- My name is Gail Ruth.

And this is 224 South Tonti.

- Been living here for 28 years.

- My grandfather built the house 125 years ago.

It's been my home when I went in the service.

I come out of the service, I come back here.

When I came home on furloughs, I came back here.

This is my home.

And it kills me for them to take my home away from me.

- I don't believe this is gonna happen to us.

I don't believe this.

But, it is.

- Why weren't we told this before we,

you know, why were we told come back and renovate,

and then tell us now, "We're gonna put the hospital here

"and tear down your house."

- I joined the service to fight for my country,

and I was willing to die for my country.

But I never thought my country

would take my home away from me.

That hurt me plenty.

(melancholy music)

- Ultimately, the area that was selected,

I know that there were people that lived in that area

that were inconvenienced.

But on balance, I think most people will agree

it's gonna be a very favorable thing for the city.

- Oh, I think it'll be a huge economic catalyst

for the city.

If you look outside the window, you see how many cranes

are up in the sky right now.

Across the street, we have $1.2 billion in construction

going on for the new University Medical Center.

- This is the largest hospital construction project

right now, anywhere in the globe.

We had a Charity Hospital.

What we did not have was an industry

that's one of the future.

You could say it's a sacrifice having gone through all this,

but in reality we're gonna be better off.

- We could evolve into a world-class medical destination

that would attract top talent, high-paying jobs,

and spin-off businesses.

What better gift could New Orleans have

than the seed for that plant to grow?

- The whole idea has been to transform,

not only the facility, but the operation.

What you see around the country is

these university-based academic medical centers

that are destination facilities.

And that's the idea behind this is to not just build

a new facility, but also build a new model

of healthcare delivery for LSU,

for the city of New Orleans, for the state.

- It seemed that the major obligation

that the Charity Hospital served was to take care

of those who had no other place to go,

who were not able to get into other private hospitals.

This new hospital will be a modern design,

modern equipment, and I think it will function

in a much more aesthetic fashion.

The rooms will be all private rooms.

So I think we will see a broader array,

a different pair mix.

- They are trying to get away from total indigent care.

But you're still gonna have indigent people

who need care, and there has to be a system for that.

- This is the sixth one built.

They've always kept the name.

So I thought, gee, they'd keep it, but they didn't, so...

- We need to use the word charity to connect us

with that 300 years of tradition.

Every state has a University Medical Center.

The tradition is lost.

- Charity as a term,

was somewhat offensive to people,

that they didn't wanna be going to a charity hospital.

They were paying for their care,

or they had insurance that would pay for their care.

I think to some extent that was felt to be a stigma.

- The closing of Big Charity was the turning point

where now nine of 10 of the public hospitals

have been closed or privatized since Katrina.

We no longer have a public hospital system in this state.

The risk is you have a lot of people

who wind up having no access.

'Cause when someone has run out of their other options,

they need some place to go if the door is shut

by all the private hospitals, which happens.

And we see this trend across the country,

where more public hospitals are becoming privatized.

And the new hospital being built

will no longer be a Charity Hospital model.

It will be run by the private entity.

- The governor wanted to move away from not just LSU,

but from the state running this facility,

and moving to a public-private partnership.

The goal is to care for all patients.

So not just indigent care patients,

but also insured patients.

- My biggest worry's it's gonna lose the mission

that it originally had from its inception

of taking care of the public.

- When I see the buildings coming up,

I hope that the people in the community

will get the care that they deserve,

regardless of their conditions, their socio-economic status,

that it's gonna be the same care that they got

once before at the old Charity.

So that's what we're hoping for.

- Good afternoon everyone. - Good afternoon.

- Welcome to the formal dedication

of University Medical Center New Orleans.

This medical center complex represents the bright future

ahead for all of us.

- We're sitting in the new University Medical Center.

It is a substantial upgrade from what we're used to.

It's a long time coming.

Our patients definitely deserve this.

Many people would say it's seven years too late.

We could talk extensively about how many lives were lost,

and we could dwell on that.

But instead, I would prefer to dwell on

what this will become and what this will offer

for an entire community.

The opportunities that this hospital represents

are enormous.

- I hope it works.

But my complaint is with the process.

And you know who's paid the price?

The people of New Orleans.

They have been denied adequate healthcare

because of the b.s. politics in this state.

And it is wrong.

(depressing music)

- Charity remains shuttered.

It's been closed since 2005 and remains

just a ghost of a building.

It clearly came down to money and economic development

over the mission of Charity Hospital.

They were willing to sacrifice our community

and let people die, all for their new hospital.

And that's just unconscionable.

- I don't know what can be done about it now.

I think it's important that people know the truth.

At the end of the movie,

when that curtain goes down, you know who suffered?

The patients.

The patients.

- When I walk by Charity Hospital, to this day,

I get a cold sweat, my gut gets into a knot.

Because I ache for what could've been there,

and I ache for our patients.

You know, a part of me died in that building,

and that's not recoverable.

- It's here, but it's an empty house.

Mother is still there, but her children aren't.

To me, it's like sacred ground.

- It's just too heartbreaking.

To think that people depended on us all these years,

and we couldn't help them when they needed help the most.

It hurts because it meant so much to so many people,

and that's gone.

I don't want people to forget.

(jazz music)

- Charity Hospital saved my life several times.

- I was born at Charity Hospital, 1961.

- Big Chief (mumbles) born at Charity Hospital 1959.

(speaking in foreign language)

- I was born at Charity Hospital on June 8, 1973.

- I'm Mr. Okra, I was born at Charity Hospital.

(speaking in foreign language)

- Number one hospital in the world.

- In the world. - In the world.

- I'm proud to say I was born at Charity Hospital in 1972.

- I was born at Charity and I've worked at Charity

in this system for 30-plus years.

- I'm Daryl Dancing Man 504,

and I am a Charity Hospital baby.

- I was born in Charity Hospital in 1957.

- I was born at Charity Hospital, 1942.

- My name is Kevin Ruffins and I was born

at Charity Hospital, I'm a Charity Hospital baby.

- I was born there,

everybody in my family was born at Charity.

- I was born there, had children there,

and almost died there.

It's gonna be a part of me forever.