Keeping the healers from the sick

From your blogstress's homegirl radio station in Newark, New Jersey, comes this story on the Web site of WBGO-FM, perhaps the best jazz station in the world:

Dr. Critty Hymes has been a staff physician with the Charity Hospital in New Orleans for the past 27 years.

She evacuated the city early Sunday morning just before the storm hit. From a family members home in Houston she watched in horror as her home town filled with water and thousands of people were left to fend for themselves.

"I know a lot of these people were my patients from Charity Hospital."

As soon as evacuees were bused to the Astrodome, she went with her medical credentials to volunteer and was stunned to be turned away at the door.

"I'm a doctor. I have 27 years of experence in OBGYN and all I wanted to do was help."

After visiting the Red Cross, entering her name and credientials on an internet medical volunteer database and getting a call from officials at the Astrodome , she has yet to be given the green light to give medical aid to those so desperately in need.

© 2005 WBGO News

Oh, and here's the story of tons of ice with nowhere to go, from Woody Baird of the Associated Press via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

About 200 tractor-trailer trucks with ice and water for victims of Hurricane Katrina took a convoluted, weeklong trip to a storage depot in Memphis, partly because of what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called "miscommunication."

The drivers were sent to cities that didn't end up needing water or ice and were final directed to Memphis, said Corps spokesman Bob Anderson.

"They're in the right place now," Anderson said Monday.