From the Macedonian health ministry saying you know take these people into Macedonia they're not a threat open your border take them in they need care and the health ministry kept refusing and so they stayed in this tent day after day. Sometimes for 456 days and several The people in this tent they died Cherrie says this experience haunted her and years later when she was a full blown reporter and traveling all around the world looking at different scenarios she would return to this memory again and again and wonder how do people in that situation make that decision how should they. This is the scenario that people in New Orleans have been fearing for a long time a Category 5 hurricane headed right toward the city because it's going to be our 1st stop we all have heard the story of Katrina told and retold But in this story the hurricane is really just a backdrop really we're going to focus in on one building this hospital Memorial Medical Center built in 1926 in one of the lowest parts of that city which is really like a bull is a sturdy brick building 8 stories tall stretching over 2 city blocks that had served in every storm until that point it was really seen a somewhere safe. And this hospital became for Sherry a kind of poor. These questions about tree Irish she ended up spending 6 and a half years interviewing doctors or the hospital patients nurses family members government officials ethicists hospital administrators she conducted over 500 interviews to reconstruct moment for moment what happened at the hospital during Hurricane Katrina. Get ready because of the most intense part of the storm is getting ready to come across day one Monday August 29th 2005 around 6 am. Trina this. I've never seen anything in my life like this and. They get through the storm OK. The city power is gone but they've got their backup power but this hospital it had a vulnerability a lot of American hospitals have which is that they had to move the generators to the 2nd floor so that they would be higher up in case of flooding but electricity is all about circuits and they had elements of that backup power system that were below flood level things like switches and other electrical material but they got through the 1st day OK and it seemed at that point that the worst was over and then . Actually after. The levees failed. Water surrounds this hospital in New Orleans and as the water started to rise around the hospital that is the moment that the people in charge knew they were in big big trouble. They knew what their vulnerability was how many patients were in the hospital at this point there were 250 patients there about 2000 people because you had so many staff and then all the visitors who had come with the staff members and with the patients So Sherry says mid-morning on that 2nd day this is Tuesday August 30th just as the waters are starting to rise a group of doctors got together and they did come up with a system which evolved a little bit over the crisis but they decided 1st get the babies out get the critical care patients out and they knew that they had to high water trucks from the National Guard in the water wasn't so so high yet at that point it was only part way up the sloping emergency room ramp and they decided to put patients who could walk on those trucks so. Helicopters start to arrive and medical staff start to bundle tiny babies in incubators I.C.U. Patients in wheelchairs on to the elevator and up to the help at how many patients can a single helicopter take the ones that were landing How many can they do one or 2 while so this is slow going yeah it was late evening before they got all the intensive care unit patients out in the you know the babies and they had all the babies all in on that 2nd day they evacuated about 60 people there 60 of the most critical patients although we should also say that if a patient had signed a D.N.R. a Do Not Resuscitate order the doctors decided those patients should not go 1st and they were held back and will sort of explain their thinking on that in just a 2nd. Darkness falls on day 2 the doctors and nurses are exhausted they've been working really really hard carrying patients in the heat many of them lay down on cots and bacon beds to rest for the night. And then. Before the sun rises few hours before. About 2 am. The buzz of the generators suddenly just. Stopped as quiet. The water had reached those electrical switches in the basement Dr Dr Cook Ewing cook a long time I see a doctor he was lying not far from where those generators were and he said to me it was quote the sickest sound of his life absence Yeah and that is when it became an absolute emergency in this hospital. It's pitch blackness some of the medical equipment they have backup battery so they started beeping to warn that the electrical power had stopped you still had 9 patients who relied on ventilators to breathe it became a hive of activity and we got to get everyone out everybody was running around with flashlights these beams in the blackness trying desperately to move those patients down the stairs now there's no elevators that the other big thing fortunately somebody found a hole in the machine room wall on the 2nd floor that led directly to a parking garage and so they figured out they can pass patients through this roughly 3 by 3 foot hole onto the back of a pickup truck drive them up to the 8th story of that parking garage and then carry them up 3 flights of steps to the formerly unused tell a pad. And 5 of the 9 patients on ventilators died just right then it's just like I said I've been trying to put it away. But I want to make this is accurate as I can for you and this is tape of an interview that she did back in 2008 when she was doing research for the story OK OK I mean if you know this film is OK just like it's family you know it was a nursing director working on the 7th floor of the hospital that day she'd actually been attending to those 9 patients that didn't make the 1st helicopter ride and she described to Sherry that right after the power went out and after the ventilator shut down one of her patients flatline and. We brought him back we had fun and We're day 3 Wednesday August 31st 2005 sun rises and that's when they're expecting all the helicopters come back and they wait and they wait and they wait and an occasional helicopter comes but this concerted rescue effort that had taken place the evening before has stopped now we know now looking back. That on that Wednesday the helicopters were doing their own tree on the Coast Guard rescue people and looking at people on rooftops waving rags so much higher family is on that roof right. But the people inside the hospital. Most of them had no idea all they knew was we're in this horrific situation where are the helicopters at this point there's still nearly 200 patients at the hospital and some of the staff there panics because it takes them so long to move the patients to the top of the parking garage just below that Hella Pad So she says on that 3rd day at about 7 in the morning bunch of doctors and hospital administrator maybe a dozen dozen and a half they got together and they decided that they needed a system a way of organizing their patients so that when those helicopters started to show up again they wouldn't waste any time at all they'd know exactly who to evacuate in water order another words Who are we going to get out 1st. That was the question and that's the moment where they come up with the ones twos and threes. This is true there are a limited number of resources in this case helicopters in a few boats and we have to decide which people get access to those resources. There are couple of ways to look at this she says if you go back to the very beginning of the 1st conception of it 790 S. Napoleon's chief surgeon he made a rule on the battlefield that you take the people who are in the acute need 1st so the sickest are going to be treated 1st and with the most resources and this is the way it works in most emergency rooms there's a long waiting line of fevers and cuts but if you've got a heart attack you get right to the front of the line another way to look at it is the utilitarian concept this got to start with some philosophers in the 18th in 1900. 80 degree just good you want to maximize some sort of good outcome amongst a population so rather than think about what one individual needs you think how can I save the most number of lives or the most number of years of life we want to maximize years of life we might want to pick people who are have a better chance of surviving who are younger people and this method of tree Ajah is what you often see in a war zone where say there's a bombing and you have more injured victims than there are ambulances or medics so 123. Imagine a lobby area and a hospital waiting area Sheri says in this case with the doctors did they ask the staff to get everyone out of their rooms bring them down to that 2nd floor lobby and then some doctors including one whose name might be relevant for later Dr and a pope she was the head next surgeon she and another doctor they stationed themselves on the landing where the patients were brought down to on that 2nd floor and as the nurses would bring them they would look quickly at the patient's chart look at the patient and decide on a number and the nurses would take a magic marker and a piece of paper and write either 12 or 3 on that paper and then she says they would tape that number on to the patient's gown so the ones where you're relatively healthy patients patient maybe who had an appendicitis and their appendix out but they're looking good they could even be discharged the ones would be rescued by boat presumably among the 1st the tubes where your more typical hospital patients patient maybe who had a heart attack who wasn't fully recovered who would need ongoing care they would go by helicopter presumably 2nd and then the Threes were those super sick patients or anyone with a Do Not Resuscitate order. Those patients would go last one of the doctors when I said why did you choose the sickest patients to go last one of them said well I figured anyone with a Do Not Resuscitate order would have a terminal or irreversible condition which by the way isn't always the case and he said I thought that that patient would have quote the least to lose so it sounds like in some way they went to more of a utilitarian way of thinking yeah and you could see everything that follows as flowing from that utilitarian decision and actually made a few different points to prioritize the healthiest people 1st and the 6 people last all 3 groups were placed in different parts of the hospital and the Threes were kept in the lobby the 2nd floor lobby to just wait. So as the day goes on the area started to get really full patient next to patient on these cots in one corner she says yet about 18 people lined up side by side and these are people with heart conditions symptoms of pneumonia stroke there were nurses standing around Fanning people get it just it was so so hot some people guessed that the temperature inside the building must have been 100 degrees I don't know there's any way for me to describe to you how intense the heat was this is Dr Ann Apolo in an interview with 60 Minutes she was one of the doctors who did the number there was the word lab. It was suffocating and made it extremely difficult to breathe and with the heat came the terrible smell it started to smell really bad and that was that's Gina Isabel again she said sewage was sort of backing up in the toilet Fannie Mae just a sewage everywhere on the ground and everywhere he just personally I didn't want to eat or drink anything because I didn't want to. Asked to his pastor and as the day went on Some people started really feeling abandoned. Why are they here why aren't they helping us and you know when you're having. Your own war zone here it looks like a war zone on the 7th floor there was this radio that was playing in the corridors . For. The local talk station and the radio was. One of the only ways they were getting information from the outside the mindset the needs to hunger the anger the rage is growing among some of the nurses have carts that they would roll around and they'd have the little radio on the cart and they'd be listening basic jungle human instincts are beginning to creep in and there were tales on the radio that were alarming the staff someone is breaking into businesses and merchandise these people should be shot things that turned out not to be true like you know one of much more near that they had declared martial law there was literally a deputy sheriff who got on air and told people that even both commented said that it looked like a shark then he saw a shark swimming around a hotel they're walking like zombies like Knights of the living dead just imagine how that would feel if you were in this hospital that was the only word you were having about what was going on outside at all until he's just like happens right can actually get out in the garage. By afternoon or that 3rd day that Wednesday some of the staff are having nervous breakdowns more aroused really really low because all these patients are still there basically. So there's this level of of panic what happened. Well so there is also the situation of the pets and this may make no sense to most people but they would offer staff members they could bring their pets if they were coming in to work a storm and they turned medical records over into a kennel and people start to worry about their pets apparently on that Wednesday one of the larger dogs in Newfoundland started having seizures from the heat so some of the staff chose to have doctors euthanize their pets and then just try to imagine if you can literally are running free right it's trying to shatter when you know it's time to climb into stores it's hot people are dying you're hearing gunshots in the neighborhood you're afraid. You don't know if there's real violence breaking out in the city there are bodies floating in the water there you don't know how many rescue resources are going to comments night time and your colleague walks up to you and says you know. We're euthanizing the pets to put them out of their misery what about the suffering patients shouldn't we put some of them out of their misery and I interviewed all these people and trying to figure out like where did this idea come from and tracing it back and there were all these little informal conversations. And. This starts just going around the hospital this this sort of idea. Of putting patients out of their misery I don't know. But that's what I heard. And you know in those circumstances what. If you're at war and you have someone that's not going to be picked up and you can carry him to safety and have believed that yeah. He did. You know let him suffer to let him. Kerry says that as this idea spread around the hospital people fell into different camps some people thought this was the most humane thing they could do it would be criminal to let people suffer more other people when they heard about it were outraged for example Dr Bryant King whose colleague Dr Forney a she walks up to him and says there's this discussion going on and you know what do you think and he says you got to get me to actually think that that's a good idea this is Dr King in an interview on C.N.N. Doc if you possibly think that that's a good idea. Day for Thursday September 1st here's what ends up happening. And accounts here are a bit vague and in dispute but according to Dr King who spoke about this on C.N.N. He says and other people say they saw this as well he says he saw one of the doctors we talked about earlier Dr Anna pope who's still there that Thursday morning caring for patients these patients on the 2nd floor who were chosen to go last he says he saw her talking to patients while holding a handful of syringes and us standing over there with a handful of Saran just talking to a patient and the words that are heard her say were I want to give you something to make you feel better they say had a handful of syringes I don't and nobody nobody walks around with a handful of the when this thing goes and gives the same thing these patients that this is not we do it. To jump forward for B. After this whole ordeal is over and the rescue teams in the mortuary teams arrived many bodies were found in this hospital. About $45.00 bodies found and so there was an investigation launched they found these bodies they tested these bodies for drugs and what they found was that nearly 2 dozen patients had received either morphine or versed said a powerful sedative or a combination of the 2 you in a very short time period on that Thursday September 1st 2005 you know how many it was I think 21 in the end but it's complicated in medicine what is comfort and what is murder depend to a large degree on the intentions of the doctor it's called the principle of the double effect it's sometimes credited to St Thomas Aquinas and it's this idea that an act that that can cause harm but if your intention is to do good then that's ethical. In doctor and a pope did you murder those patients as the attorney general alleges No I did not murder those patients and I want everybody to know that I am not a murderer that we are not murderers in that 60 Minutes interview Dr Post flatly denies euthanizing anybody and at various points in the interview she is clearly distraught at the accusation it completely ripped my heart out because my entire life I have taught to do good and my entire adult life I have given everything that I have within me to take care of my patients but Sherri did talk to one doctor Dr Ewing cook we mentioned earlier we were talking about the generators he's a doctor who deals a lot with end of life care and he was very open with her about the decisions he made he had gone upstairs visited Mrs Burr Jess cancer patient to see how she was doing and he was just thinking to himself she's so so sick she's got advanced cancer I can't imagine she would have more than maybe a week to live at the best of circumstances she is weighted down with fluid which can happen toward the end of life so she weighs a lot she's on the 8th floor so we'd have to carry her downstairs and plus there's 4 nurses up here taking care of her Couldn't we use them somewhere else so he literally turned to one of the nurses and said Can you give her enough morphine till she goes. And that nurse charted huge increase in morphine for her and she died. And that was his thought so he made this decision and to this day or at least the last time we spoke he felt he did the right thing he said to me he thought it was desperate he saw only 2 choices quickened their deaths or abandon them and I mean if that was the real situation there some at this would say either of those choices would be you know not justified but excusable but one of the arguments you could make is that when you give up on one person it then becomes a little bit easier to give up on the next person and then the next person then suddenly you're on a slippery slope and Sherry did tell us about this one case his case was very haunting and that Everett 61 year old doting grandfather very very heavy he weighed 380 pounds and he was up on the 7th floor of the hospital he was conscious alert fed him self breakfast asked his nurses are we ready to rock N roll he said to one nurse who never forgot it Cindy don't let him leave me behind don't let them leave me behind but he had had a spinal cord stroke he couldn't walk he was on the 7th floor of the hospital with no working elevators and the staff told me they couldn't imagine how they would carry him down those flights of stairs let alone what a helicopter take a man of his size and he was one of the patients who was found with this drug combination in this body and he was and