With more than 500 interviews and three years of intense research, she details the lives of those involved and the ensuing investigation in a way that defies quick judgements.
It is Fink’s patient development of the events at Memorial that makes the book so compelling. One doctor and two nurses were eventually arrested and accused of second degree murder in the deaths of some of the patients. What happened to those patients, forty-five of whom died, was the subject of an ongoing debate in both the courts and among national disaster experts-and continues to challenge medical ethicists and hospital administrators today, more than ten years later. But they chose to first evacuate those most likely to survive, leaving the critical patients in the hospital.
A helicopter rescue was arranged by cell phone, and staff began to move patients to the roof of a parking garage. When Memorial Medical staffers reached the hospital’s owner, Tenet Healthcare Corporation, by phone, they learned that there was no rescue plan in place. But the most harrowing effects of the storm began as the skies cleared.
When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans at daybreak on August 29, it brought 145 mile-an-hour winds and a 29-foot storm surge. In his Bookforum review of Sheri Fink’s 2013 bestseller Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, Jeff Sharlet wrote that the book, “like all great journalism,” was “a document unto itself, an artifact of what we thought about ‘life and death’ issues in the early twenty-first century.” Developed out of a Pulitzer Prize winning article Fink wrote for The New York Times Magazine, Five Days at Memorial recounts, in minute detail, the events at Memorial Medical Center in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the last days of August and the first days of September 2005, and the investigation into deaths there that followed.