God Help Us All

"The enormity of the disaster came ever-clearer in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, which was hit by a levee break that brought a wall of water up to 20 feet high. State Rep. Nita Hutter said 30 people died at a flooded nursing home in Chalmette when the staff left the elderly residents behind in their beds. And Rep. Charlie Melancon said more than 100 people died at a dockside warehouse while they waited for rescuers to ferry them to safety.

From the article "Some New Orleans Holdouts Leave Reluctantly," By SHARON COHEN, AP, NEW ORLEANS (Sept. 7)  as seen at http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20050824033709990005

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      The employees who deserted those elderly patients should be brought up on criminal charges by the Federal government AND State government!   How dare they leave human beings to drown, especially when nursing home patients are often immobile or need assistance to get to a sitting position.  They could have placed each patient in a Geri-chair and wheeled them to a central place where they might be safer -- or someplace where their heads might have been higher than the water level !  To be stranded in hospital beds, and often restrained as many nursing home patients are kept on a daily basis, and left to drown is a criminal act of homocide. 

       What are the identites of those employees?  Where did they go?  Who rescued them?  AND what employees, if any, told any person in authority that the patients were there?  OR, did they all act cowardly, run away from their responsibility and never mention the patients to anyone?? 

        Where is the television coverage on this story?  Where is CNN - why hasn't a journalist tracked down those employees to whatever shelter they are in and asked them "WHY did you kill those people?"  The easy answer is "I didn't kill them; the floodwaters killed them."  But, the moral responsibility of caregivers is the same, whether in the face of any conditions at that institution.  Every institution has evacuation plans for fire, flood, etc.  Yes, the New Orleans flood was not within the "normal" scope of disasters, but thoseemployees did not even try to rescue those patients!

          Through the New Orleans tragedy, we have witnessed a large number of examples of the moral decline of America.  Snipers shooting at rescuers and those trying to make repairs to pumping, cell towers, electrical grid; rapes and murders at the Dome; leaving the invalid strapped to hospital beds....  All I can say is, God help us all.