Althea LaCoste, a frail woman who needed a ventilator to help her breathe, died hours after Hurricane Katrina knocked out the emergency power at Pendleton Methodist Hospital in New Orleans.
More than four years later, her family is asking a jury to hold the hospital liable for the death of the 73-year-old, one of more than 100 people who died at hospitals or nursing homes in Katrina's aftermath.
Jurors heard opening statements Tuesday from lawyers on both sides of the wrongful death case against the hospital, which hasn't reopened since the storm. The trial in Orleans Parish Civil District Court is believed to be the first for a lawsuit over a hospital patient's death after the August 2005 hurricane.
LaCoste was recovering from pneumonia and using a portable ventilator when relatives took her to Methodist Hospital on the eve of Katrina's landfall. She died after the hospital lost its emergency electrical power and her ventilator stopped working.
Laurence Best, a lawyer for LaCoste's family, claimed Methodist Hospital and its owner, Universal Health Services Inc. of King of Prussia, Pa., negligently failed to prepare for a storm of Katrina's magnitude.
"This hospital knew, or should have known, it had to be prepared for catastrophic flooding," he said.
David Bowling, an attorney for the hospital, said Methodist had detailed plans for protecting patients from hurricanes and a well-designed emergency generator system. But it was impossible for the hospital to be completely "flood-proof," he told jurors.
"Do we have a right to expect that (the hospital) be impervious and invulnerable to the greatest natural disaster in the history of America?" he asked.
The hospital had a generator on its roof with a fuel tank for its emergency power supply, but Katrina's flood waters disabled a fuel pump on the ground level. The generator on the roof stopped working when the fuel pump flooded.
"They could have fixed it cheaply," Best said. "They failed to do so, and she died as a result."
To support their claim that the hospital knew it was vulnerable to flooding but failed to act, plaintiffs' attorneys cited a 2002 e-mail that a senior Methodist administrator, Cameron Barr, wrote in response to a city official's inquiry about the cost of elevating generators.
"The first question is, do we have generators placed to accommodate an emergency flood with 15 feet of water. The answer to that question is no, while one of our main generators is on the roof of the East Tower of Methodist Hospital, the other is next to the power plant and would be nonfunctional at about two feet of flood water around the generator," Barr wrote.
The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that LaCoste's family could sue the hospital and its owner for negligence instead of for medical malpractice, in which claims must be submitted to a medical review panel and awards are subject to a $500,000 cap.
Sean Ahrens, a security consultant for Schirmer Engineering, a firm that helps hospitals assess and protect themselves from disasters, said a verdict in favor of LaCoste's family could impose an expensive burden on other hospitals across the country to protect against unrealistic threats.
"You can only do so much, and there's always going to be something worse," he said.
Similar lawsuits have been filed against several other New Orleans area hospitals, including Memorial Medical Center, where 34 people died in the days following Katrina.
A doctor and two nurses at Memorial were accused by then-Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti of killing four critically ill patients with overdoses of a sedative-painkiller mix in the days after the storm. Cancer surgeon Dr. Anna Pou and the two nurses were arrested but never indicted in the case. All three denied the accusations.
Anthony Irpino, a lawyer for plaintiffs in separate class action lawsuits against several different New Orleans area hospitals, said this trial could set the tone for other cases awaiting trials in federal and state courts.
"You can't get away from the fact that other hospitals are going to be looking to see how that (trial) goes and what a jury is going to decide," he said.
Nobody knows when LaCoste died, but her body was recovered from the hospital after survivors were evacuated. Bowling said LaCoste had a host of serious medical problems before she arrived at the hospital, after other hospitals refused to admit her.
"In their moment of most desperate need, we did not turn our backs on them when the hurricane had them and us in its sights," Bowling said of the LaCoste family.
No doctors or nurses are named as defendants in the LaCoste family's suit, and their lawyer praised Methodist's staff for their heroic treatment of patients during Katrina's chaotic aftermath.
"But they were not mechanics, and they were not electricians," he said.
Judge Kern Reese is presiding over the trial, which is expected to last about two weeks.