Louisiana officials on Tuesday revoked the licenses of the seven nursing homes that evacuated patients to a warehouse where seven of them died before Hurricane Ida’s landfall last week.

Fallout from the storm, which struck south of New Orleans last week, has had a deadly toll on the state’s oldest residents as power outages have stretched on for more than a week amid high temperatures.

Five more people were found dead over the weekend at private and nonprofit senior-living apartments across the city. Conditions in those facilities led to evacuations of some 600 residents, with the coroner classifying the deaths as “likely storm-related.”

City officials said Tuesday that a team was continuing to monitor occupied senior-living facilities and that it would ensure shuttered buildings are up to code before residents are allowed to return.

Jennifer Avegno, director of the city’s health department, said at a Monday news conference that difficulties with communication led her office to conduct wellness checks at the senior facilities beginning last week.

“In some of these facilities, we found fairly stark conditions,” Avegno said. “No power. No elevator. No lights. Individuals in their rooms who couldn’t access normal supports or services. Tragically, in some places, our staff discovered residents who had died and had not yet been discovered.”

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Officials evacuated nine facilities because of “emergent threats to life and safety,” Avegno said. Hundreds of tenants were shuttled to state-run shelters across the region.

Christopher Homes, a ministry of the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans that ran facilities where three tenants were found dead, did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. In a statement Sunday, Christopher Homes said tenants were required to provide personal evacuation plans in advance of hurricane season. It added that despite being encouraged to evacuate, 286 tenants opted to shelter in place during the storm, in some cases because they lacked the means to leave without city-provided resources.

Christopher Homes also said building managers could not close the residences in advance of Ida without a mandatory evacuation order from the city. New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, D, said ahead of the storm that Ida’s quick advance meant it was “too late” to issue such an order.

In response to the ministry’s statement, Cantrell emphasized that none of the nine shuttered facilities was city-run.

“I think accountability needs to be where it is. And that’s on these institutions, the diocese, whomever is responsible for operating, maintaining and protecting the lives of the elderly, which they are paid to do,” she said Monday.

“So we’re not going to get into a blame-game scenario,” she continued. “We’re going to call it what it is. And it was negligence. And it is not on the backs of the city of New Orleans.”

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City council member Kristin Gisleson Palmer, D, whose office took part in inspections at buildings in her district, criticized the facilities that blamed residents for failing to evacuate.

“They’re hiding under this loophole of independent living,” she said. “It’s not independent living if there’s no power and you’re in a wheelchair on the fourth floor.”

Avegno said Tuesday that the situation that unfolded at New Orleans senior-living facilities highlighted a “policy gap” that administrators would look to remedy. Unlike nursing homes, she explained, senior-living facilities are not required to formulate and implement formal evacuation plans for their residents.

Cantrell, the mayor, said Monday that she hoped to see building operators held accountable, and that she wanted senior-living facilities to be required not only to have generators, but to hire on-site emergency contractors to hook up those generators.

The seven nursing homes that evacuated more than 800 patients to a warehouse in Independence, La., in advance of the storm are owned by the same person, Bob Dean, and are being investigated by the Louisiana attorney general. Five of the deaths were deemed hurricane-related.

Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who led post-Hurricane Katrina military relief efforts, told The Washington Post on Tuesday that the warehouse evacuation was “wrong” and called for policy changes.

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“They know they have to evacuate people, and they did that,” he said. “But you don’t send them to a freaking warehouse.”

Power outages remained a problem across Louisiana on Tuesday, more than a week after Ida lashed the state.

The outages and crushing heat led the Federal Emergency Management Agency to offer rental assistance to those wanting to get out of the region, even days out from the storm. In New Orleans, more than 14,000 residents had flocked to generator-run cooling sites by Monday morning.

The lack of power also contributed directly to the storm’s death toll here, with officials reporting that generator usage caused four carbon monoxide poisoning deaths in the state, as well as 141 emergency room visits.

Entergy, the state’s largest power utility, said it had restored power to 60% of storm-impacted customers by Tuesday morning. In New Orleans, about a quarter of customers remained without power, and Entergy said it hoped to restore power to the majority of the city by Wednesday.

But the company had already foiled some of its restoration timeline, creating confusion for those in and out of the region on how to proceed: Without a reliable sense of when the power might return, those still here were unsure of whether to stay put, and those who had evacuated elsewhere were unsure of when to come back.

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Tuesday marked the final day New Orleans would provide free transportation to shelters in north Louisiana and neighboring states. Officials said Monday morning that more than 700 New Orleanians had taken advantage of the evacuation services. Collin Arnold, the city’s homeland security and emergency preparedness director, said the elderly and otherwise vulnerable made up more than three-quarters of those evacuees.

A week out from Ida, leaders across the state expressed remorse that lessons that could have been learned during Hurricane Katrina – particularly in regard to these vulnerable populations – had not been implemented during Ida.

“How can this happen after we’ve gone through Katrina, and had those deaths in the nursing homes then, and set things in place so this would never happen again?” Louisiana Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, R, told CNN.

“It’s just unthinkable. It’s embarrassing,” he said.

Avegno, the New Orleans health director, agreed. “To repeat a tragedy is inexcusable,” she said.


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