Earl Bockenfeld's Radio Weblog

Then, after Gonzalez, her husband and more than 100 other employees and their families spent days trapped by rising floodwater, the Pennsylvania-based corporation that owns Chalmette Medical Center, Universal Health Services, told its employees that they could count on only two more weeks of pay.

"They left me to die," Gonzalez said. "And now nobody's even called to say, 'Thank you,' nobody's even called to say, 'I'm sorry.' "

In the days following Katrina, southeastern Louisiana's hospitals became isolated deathtraps as power failed, water rose and severely ill patients could no longer survive. Officials have not accounted for all the patients at the two-story Chalmette hospital, but staff members say at least four died, three of whom were critically ill and had orders that they not be resuscitated.

Several hours after the hurricane struck early Monday, Sewell lay down in his first-floor office for a nap. He felt water on his back. Water was pouring into the hospital, drowning the first-floor generators. The waters that were beginning to rise in New Orleans were inundating St. Bernard Parish. Within two hours, about 16 feet of water covered the first floor, and rescue workers launched airboats off the second floor terrace to retrieve neighbors stranded on their roofs.

For the next three days, up to 400 evacuees took shelter on the hospital's second floor. Food and water were tightly rationed � meals consisted of a scoop of cottage cheese, a few slices of fruit and two pieces of ham. Staff desperately tried to keep conditions sanitary without a sewage system and tried to break shatter-proof windows to let fresh air into the scorching building.

By Wednesday, parish officials had found a scrap of dry land to function as a triage center. Sheriff's deputies, firefighters and civilians began to shuttle patients to the parish jail, which sat on high ground. The next morning, the last of the staff was evacuated by a National Guard helicopter. Sewell was on the last flight off the hospital roof.

But it is Universal Health Services' behavior after the flooding that has infuriated the residents of St. Bernard Parish, a devastated suburb of 65,000 residents, where every neighborhood was inundated. The area remains uninhabitable, buried by mud. The hospital is severely damaged.

Officials at Universal say the anger is understandable after such a catastrophe, but they contend they did everything they could for their patients and employees. They say they tried to evacuate their hospital � albeit at least a day after emergency officials say they urged it � but that it was too late to get all the patients out. The company, which had $3.9 billion in revenue last year and says it is the nation's third-largest hospital management corporation, says it is trying to place employees with some of its 84 other facilities and has started a foundation to aid those who lost their homes.

But Universal says on its website that it is committed to paying through Saturday the 2,800 employees at its three New Orleans-area hospitals, including the 900 at Chalmette. It says they will receive insurance coverage through at least the end of October.