I trust most people remember the sorrowful and deeply moving sight of Aaron Broussard on Meet the Press last Sunday. I remember listening with shock to Broussard describing the inability of his co-worker (or anyone else for that matter) to save the life of the co-worker's mother, who was trapped in her nursing home. He said:
"The guy who runs this building I'm in, Emergency Management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' and he said, 'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you.' ... and she drowned Friday night." There is no St. Bernard Nursing Home in Lousianna. There is, however, St. Rita's in both the city and parish of St. Bernard, where
thirty people reportedly died. I think that although Broussard said "St. Bernard nursing home," St. Rita's is at least plausibly the nursing home he was talking about. More after the jump.
First, it's important to establish that Broussard could not have been refering to a genuine nursing home named St. Bernard. I could not find one using either a yellowpages.com search or a search using Myziva.net, which is an online guide to nursing homes searchable by county. In fact, using the Yellowpages.com I could not find a single Saint Bernard Nursing Home in all of LO. Assuming I didn't miss something in my searches, it stands to reason that Broussard was either mistaken about the name or was speaking loosely (i.e. he said "St. Bernard Nursing Home" but meant "a St. Bernard nursing home"). I'm pretty confident that he was either mistaken or speaking loosely given my inability to find a nursing home named St. Bernard Nursing Home. Moreover, I think it's at least plausible that he meant St. Rita's Nursing Home because there is only one other nursing home in the city of St. Bernard (Fernandez Nursing Home) and four other nursing homes in the parish. Also, I should note that none of the other nursing homes in the parish is named after a saint.
Now I admit that there is a pausity of concrete evidence to prove my speculation that Broussard actually was refering to a woman in St. Rita's Nursing Home. But if he was, the magnitude of the failure to rescue these nursing home patients seems to grow tremendously. If Broussard's story is otherwise accurate, there was at least one working phone in the nursing home. True, we don't know how or when the thirty people died in St. Rita's, but it stands to reason that if the woman Broussard mentioned was in St. Rita's, at least some of the other thirty people who eventually died were in the same position as the woman Broussard spoke of (namely alive and communicative and, more importantly, in communication with the outside world for days before they died).