2022-08-11 07:00:00
There’s a moment in Five Days at Memorial when the staff at the Uptown New Orleans hospital suddenly realize just how abandoned they are. A helper on the rickety helideck, which can only be reached via a rusty stair construction, sees Air Force One fly past, the presidential machine is a milky ghostly finger in the radiant blue of the sky. The potus is on the way.
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President Bush makes no stopovers
But he makes no stopover with the oppressed and desperate of Louisiana. No consolation. Nowhere. This picture reminds you what a failure this Republican President George W. Bush was, who was fortunate enough to later fall into the shadow of Trump, the even unimaginably much worse President.
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Katrinagate was later named those days of early fall 2005, following Nixon’s Watergate – because many believed the Bush administration had failed. On August 29, 2005, Katrina ransacked what America calls “The Big Easy.” In the days following the devastation, canals burst and flooded New Orleans.
That’s how the Memorial Medical Center in Uptown became an island with the seventh floor rented from Life Care Hospitals. Where everything collapsed and where bad decisions had to be made. “Five Days at Memorial” was the name of Sheri Fink’s book documentation of a nightmare that became real. From which the streaming service Apple TV + made the mini series “Memorial Hospital – The Days After Hurricane Katrina”. A series helmed by master storytellers John Ridley (Oscar winner for the screenplay of 12 Years a Slave) and Carlton Cuse (showrunner of Lost and Bates Motel).
Beginning with the end: Response teams in epidemic suits find 45 human bodies lined up at Memorial Hospital on September 11, 2005. An interrogation takes place, in no comparable hospital in the Katrina precinct there were more corpses.
There was no evacuation plan in the memorial
“You have to understand the circumstances,” says the chair of the Memorial’s Emergency Preparedness Committee, Susan Mulderick (Cherry Jones), the protagonist of the first episodes. And then it goes into these same circumstances. When Mulderick can’t find an evacuation plan for the approaching storm. When the doctor Anna Pou (Vera Farmiga) returns unscheduled because she wants to take care of her patients. When you take in hundreds and hundreds of people seeking refuge. When on the seventh floor of Life Care, severely overweight diabetic patient Emmett Everett (Damon Standifer) reassures worried administrative assistant Diane Robichaux (Julie Ann Emery), “I’m fine.” Though that’s not true.
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The thunder breaking in “Memorial Hospital” sounds vicious, the rain outside looks like a wall of living threads, and the sound of this wet hell is so frightening as if this were a disaster movie from it into the windows of the hospital. Again and once more one hears the almost screaming newscasters, making panic into ratings, one sees satellite photos on the television showing the gigantic white storm wheel with the small black hub.
Cello and piano, the “voices” of melancholy, farewell and sadness, prepare the viewer for the coming events. It all only begins when everything seems to be over, when the sky is blue once more and the first jokes are already being sent following Katrina. Suddenly the water pushes open the canal walls, the floods sweep away entire streets of New Orleans and the sandbags at the memorial are no longer sufficient.
The sequence of the rescue is determined with a triage
The supplies cannot be brought up in time and following the public power supply, the in-house generators soon fail – and with them the devices and the air conditioning. 2000 people sweat and suffer in the hospital that becomes a sauna. Patients who have been laboriously brought to the ramp wait in vain for the promised boats. Then the first sick die.
Five of the eight episodes are dedicated to the increasing chaos. Up to and including the resolution of a triage (those who can walk without support and help themselves should get a green bracelet, there are yellow and red ones and finally black ones for those who cannot be saved under the given circumstances).
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And down to a heartbreaking decision made following relentless rescue workers called “last boat at 5pm” on day five, leaving the critically ill at risk of being left without any care. The fact that no one is left behind does not apply here. Now Vera Farmiga, melancholy become a woman since Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” (2009), comes to the fore.
“Memorial” fits – this has to be remembered
“Memorial” is the appropriate name for the place where it happened. Because it must be remembered how the police shouted their “Go!” in the stairwells of the hospital in the last few minutes. Go! Go!” roars as authorities abandon those in need, as loved ones are snatched away from patients, as the Hippocratic Oath of Pous gives way to another no less serious commitment. And how Emmett Everett, realizing that he cannot be saved, cries and cannot even find the last words from his forlornness: “My wife … just tell her … whatever.”
The three remaining episodes include the love, anger and suspicions of the bereaved, the questions of the investigators (played by Michael Gaston and Molly E. Hager), a trial for second-degree murder (premeditated, without treachery) and the troubles of the defendants, whom who were not there to make clear the degree of their hopelessness at the time. We spectators were witnesses – it was almost unbearable even for us to watch.
From the politicians’ smiles in the face of the catastrophe
In the very last scene, the authors surprisingly invoke the power of narrative and self-deception and surprise with a nice trick. The real Anna Pou, however, should hardly like it.
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By the way, President Bush will come to New Orleans following all. But being president is just as little for him here as it was four years ago when he was told regarding Nine Eleven and sat motionless, unable to react. This time he’s grinning broadly for the camera while people sit on the roofs of their houses and wait for the helicopter. Armin Laschet in the Ahr Valley, on the other hand, looks like a sad dumpling.
Memorial Hospital: The Days After Hurricane Katrina Miniseries, Eight Episodes, Directed by John Ridley and Carlton Cuse, Starring Vera Farmiga, Cherry Jones, Richard Pine, Michael Gaston, Molly E. Hager (Aug. 12 on Apple TV+)
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