The storm could not have come at a worse time for hospitals in Louisiana with ICUs already

overwhelmed with patients in the latest COVID surge. New Orleans is completely without
power this morning making already tough situation, even more difficult for doctors, nurses, and
patients. We're joined now by Dr. Kline physician in chief at Children's Hospital in New Orleans.
Dr. Kline, good morning.

Good morning.

Can you bring us up to date on exactly what the situation is at your hospital.

Well, we had a rough day. We have a considerable amount of damage to the hospital itself,
including to our brand new building, which is a $300 million building that literally opened two
days before the hurricane's landfall. We've had intrusion of water onto the ground floor,
several inches of water into our chapel, which has not even been used at this point.

Also water through the roof. We have issues with electricity, of course, no electricity so we're
on emergency generation and have been on that emergency power for a little more than 12
hours. The good News is that all of our patients stayed safe. We were locked down from about
6 o'clock yesterday morning on we're still locked down.

So we've got a lot of staff that are in the hospital either literally not sleeping at all or sleeping
on air mattresses and they did a great job taking care of the patients and all of the patients are
safe, but going forward, we're very concerned about the power situation. We're concerned
about clean water, and we have a substantial number of critically ill children in the hospital and
we're making contingency plans for potentially transferring them to a Children's Hospital in
another state if necessary.

You've been operating on backup generators thus far, when do you expect to get full power
back? Are you like everyone else?

Well, we've been told is that the power grid failure in New Orleans was cataclysmic and that we
can expect to be without power for a week or more. Our sense is that there really isn't a
timetable for restoration of power. We currently have fuel for emergency generation to last
about another four days, and we don't know what our ability will be to get additional fuel in
given the situations with the roads.

Without power, you don't get clean water and you don't have sufficient sewerage out. I'm just
curious is there an evacuation plan that you are looking at moving forward pasos for four days?

Yes, so we began the contingency planning and scenario planning around that last night, we did
most of that overnight and would be placing some calls to a couple of other children's hospitals
today. Fewer than 5% of all of the hospitals nationally are children's hospitals.

So we don't have the luxury of being able to transfer patients in just any hospital because we
really take care of the sickest of the sick, children with very complex medical problems and so
would have to be a facility that has capabilities that are similar to ours, and we cover a broad
swath of the Gulf South.

We're very proud of the fact that we're standing in the gap for children across Louisiana and the
central Gulf South, and if we're put in a position of having to do that, it will be a significant
problem for children and families across a several hundred mile swath of this part of the
country.

Yeah, so much of your staff has endured so much in terms of their mental emotional health. We
send them our best. Dr. Mark Kline, thank you and thank you for all that you do.