With the hurricane, the main thing you're dealing with is fear.
You have to remain calm for your patients.
You have to reassure them that you're going to feed that baby.
See, I wouldn't let the mothers feed their babies.
Normally that was something they did.
The only ones that I allowed were the breast feeders.
They had to go out because her milk had to come out.
She had to be allowed to breastfeed.
And when they brought me all those babies,
I remember I called Central Supply to see how many
extra rubber suction they had.
And I said, okay, I've got 14 premiums.
I'll take care of that one.
And I said, are you going to hurry up with that
when I'm not going to deliver your baby?
He says, can't you?
I remember that.
Marguerite Moe got her first job as a nurse in 1956.
She was working in obstetrics and helped with delivery,
postpartum, and the nursery at Lake Charles Memorial Hospital.
When Hurricane Audrey hit Southwest Louisiana in 1957,
Moe was put in charge of 41 newborns, their parents,
and a room full of expectant mothers.
She sat down with the American Press to share her first-hand
account of Hurricane Audrey.
We also had no pre-prepared formula nor pre-sterilized
bottles or nipples.
We fed the babies every three hours.
So that was eight bottles per baby.
So when I had 41 babies, I knew that I had to come up
with 321 bottles of formula.
And we had to cook it.
We had to maintain it at a certain temperature
and be very careful because if we went over that amount,
the babies would spit up and get into gestion.
You had to have it at a certain temperature,
certain pounds of pressure.
So I'll never forget getting those first 320 bottles
of formula ready.
And I only had one person helping me, Miss Bell.
And I was seven weeks from delivering my second baby.
There were no elevators.
You had to go up and down the stairs to get to anywhere.
And the only place that electricity went out on a Wednesday,
and Hurricane hit Thursday.
From what time Wednesday we lost our electricity,
I do not remember, but I had one batch of formula made.
But then I knew I couldn't get another one ready
for the day that it would hit.
So after I did the first 320 bottles,
you got to realize now, here I am.
I found a number three tub, which is a big tub,
that's this big.
And I could get almost enough bottles in there,
but I would have to go down to the kitchen
on a gas stove and cook them,
which meant I had no control over how they would come out.
Well, it was very hard on a stairwell
to have someone helping you carry something heavy
and not spill and not meet a very pregnant woman
trying to make her way up.
Now, there would be two men pushing her,
one on each side and the back end,
because she could barely walk.
And everybody who thought they were going to have a baby
was at Memorial Hospital.
So I went down to the kitchen with one batch,
and I did one batch.
So I had enough now.
You got to realize each baby ate every three hours,
so that was eight bottles per baby.
And you had to wash all these bottles
and sterilize all these bottles
and all these nipples every time
and take care of your baby.
And your preemies, you had to tube feed them,
and I mean put a tube down their nose,
only a registered nurse could do that to the stomach,
and that was every three hours.
So you were so taxed.
I tried to remember, I didn't sleep.
I didn't sleep until it was all over,
because I would have known where I slept.
So I'll say this.
My first concern was my mother living a block
from the hospital,
and my husband and baby,
which also lived a block,
and they told us that we could have our families
come to the hospital.
So I called my husband
and told him to bring my 10-month-old child.
And I looked out the nursery window
where we prepared the formula,
and we had a new 57 Chevrolet,
and I saw him turn from 18th Street
onto 2nd Avenue on two wheels.
And I prayed that the car would not turn over.
The wind was that strong when I was looking at it.
And at that time the oak trees
were going down everywhere at that point.
And you got to realize, everything had windows.
So we had big windows like this in the cafeteria.
We had windows on the east side of the nursery.
We had windows on the other side of the nursery
where the parents could see their babies.
Now, mothers didn't keep the babies in the room.
They could only see them at feeding time.
You seldom had a C-section,
and almost all mothers stayed four to five days.
No one went home any earlier than that.
So now, when everything got rough and Cameron,
all the pregnant women headed for the hospital.
Now, right across the hall,
just down a little bit to the left was a room
about almost this size this room is,
and it was called the Start Club.
And that's where the father sat waiting.
They couldn't go in the delivery room,
and they couldn't go in the room
to see the babies.
And they would sit there waiting.
Well, the night before it hit,
and the day it hit,
the whole Start Club was dedicated to pregnant women.
And some of them were cramping,
and some weren't, some were scared,
and some were squared.
We wouldn't be able to deliver the baby.
They didn't have it on the floor.
We have enough stretchers.
It was unreal what went on.
I got a lot of blankets and taped them over.
The wall of windows was that big about from there,
and taped blankets in case the windows blew in.
Then I taped the other windows that they could look through
because I was afraid they would break them
to get to their babies.
It was that scary.
And then I went and told every mother
that no matter what happened,
I would block the door and I wouldn't let them in the nursery
because I was scared they'd take the wrong baby.
We didn't have identifications like we do now.
We had little bracelets,
but I wasn't sure that the air-based babies
would have the bracelets when they got there.
And even if they did, I didn't know who the parents were.
I just, the air-based just brought me babies.
And we had 41 of them.
And so it didn't take me long
to call the chief of pediatrics, Dr. McGee,
and say, please let me go to aseptic technique.
And I know you don't know what that is.
That meant that I, and you got to realize
the baby doctors had different ways of their formula.
Some would want plain carnation and water,
and sterile water.
It was sterilized.
Some wanted cavo in there, some wanted extra muftals.
So you had to know the doctors and their babies
and feed them differently.
So I went to the chief of pediatrics and I said,
please let me use aseptic technique
and give me an order that I can give all the babies
the same formula.
He said, go for it.
I said, okay.
So then we got all of our carnation milk.
Then we had to find canopners to punch the can
in the nursery to have enough canopners.
Simple things.
And we were going to have to have a way
to boil the nipples in the bottles.
Even though we weren't sterilizing it,
we had to start with a sterile bottle,
pour the pet milk, pour the water
for every baby that was in there,
and lead us to say it was unreal.
But we got it done.
No one tried to break in.
I kept going down the hall reassuring all these mothers
whose babies I had.
They were going to be okay.
Then we had a disaster happen the day the herd could head.
Just thank God it happened just before lunch.
The cafeteria cooked a lot of food for all the employees
and whose family members were there.
And the buffet line where you went through
to get your food was under the glasses.
And when the winds got to 110 miles an hour,
it busted.
All those winds were down there into the food
the day of the hurricane.
And I know the winds were 145 in Cameron,
but when they got here at that hospital,
they were 110.
That was the recorded measurement at the cafeteria wall,
which was in front of the hospital.
So then they had to pull out bread
and other things to give us sandwiches.
And we didn't get to go home.
We stayed there through the night, again through the next day.
And I remember in one of my trip downstairs,
I always saw Dr. Clark from Cameron.
He was down there.
We didn't know what to do with all the dead people.
The mark was full.
We didn't know where to put them.
They were pronouncing them dead as they would roll them in.
I can remember going down there and 10 or 12 doctors,
I knew them all standing there, trying to decide
what are we going to do with all these people that are dead.
We have no place to put them.
And the generators weren't working.
I mean, you got to stop and think.
Without a generator to take care of a whole hospital,
now there was no air conditioning.
So cooling wasn't an issue.
The issue was safety and food.
But the hospital was...
Well, let me put it to you this way.
No one went around bragging or saying good things
because there was so much sadness.
Everyone had someone they knew that had died.
There was just too much sadness with all the deaths.
And how unprepared we are.
There was no one saying,
well, I'm pleased with the way this came out.
No one was happy about that.
And there was no disaster plan in the city,
no infrastructure, no communications,
no system, period.
There was nothing, no warnings.
I think we were ahead because of the base
getting hold of us for the babies.
I don't know that we'd have been really prepared.
I don't think anyone really believed
it would be that bad either.
All we could talk about when it was over
was how lucky each of us was
that we still had our home,
our children,
our jobs and our life.
Thank you.
