Nursing in the Storm: Voices from Hurricane Katrina

2010 PROSE Award Winner for Nursing & Allied Health Sciences!

2010 AJN Book of the Year Award Winner in Public Interest and Creative Works!

The accounts are vivid, colorful, descriptive, intense, and often horrific and give cross-sectional views of life in the trenches during this disasterÖThis book is a rich primary source for both historians and disaster preparedness planners. It's not only a tribute to the courage of the nurses, but should also serve as a guide for policy planners hoping to avoid less than optimal responses to future crises.--AJN

[T]he book...fascinates simply for its raw documentation of the dreadful events and conditions endured by nurses, doctors, and ancillary staff as they struggled to care for critically ill patients without electricity, running water, air conditioning systems, and other resources. Five years after the levees broke, the horror and chaos of Katrina is still fresh in these accounts. Through the stories, readers are transported into the hospitals as nurses heroically work together to evacuate babies from NICUs and vented patients from ICU, try to calm patients, family members, and coworkers, and make do with the equipment and supplies they've got.--National Nurse

Don't ever think that this can't happen to you. You are going to read this and it's going to sound like we created this scenario, but this is a real scenario that happened.

--Pam, Memorial Medical Center

Everything that was battery operated eventually died. There were no monitors...we tried to take care of people in the most humane way possible.

--Lois, Lindy Boggs Medical Center

Nursing in the Storm: Voices from Hurricane Katrina takes you inside six New Orleans hospitals-cut off from help for days by flooding-where nurses cared for patients around the clock. In this book, nurses from Hurricane Katrina share what they did, how they coped, what they lost, and what they are doing now in a city and health care infrastructure still rebuilding, still in jeopardy.

In their own words, the nurses tell what happened in each hospital just before, during, and after the storm. Danna and Cordray provide an intimate portrait of the experience of Katrina, which they and their colleagues endured.

Just a few of the heroic nurses you'll find inside:

Rae Ann and twenty others, including her husband and children, who wait on a hospital roof for help to come Lisa, in the midst of caring for patients, who has not heard from her husband in 5 days Roslyn, who has 800 people in her hospital when the power generators shut down Linda, who uses bed sheets to write out help messages on a hospital roof, hoping someone will see them

The book also discusses how to plan and prepare for future disasters, with a closing chapter documenting the "lessons learned" from Katrina, including day-to-day health care delivery in a city of crisis. This groundbreaking work serves as a testament to nurses' professionalism, perseverance, and unwavering dedication.