The state of Louisiana has revoked the licenses of seven nursing homes that evacuated more than 800 residents ahead of Hurricane Ida to a squalid warehouse north of New Orleans where several people died.
“All of these nursing facilities clearly failed to execute their emergency preparedness plans to provide essential care and services to their residents,” Courtney N. Phillips, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health, said in a statement on Tuesday. “When issues arose post-storm, we now know the level of care for these residents plummeted.”
The seven nursing homes are now prohibited from admitting new patients or taking in those who lived there before the storm.
Ms. Phillips said the owner of the nursing homes failed to communicate the situation to state health officials. When the state investigated after getting word of poor conditions at the warehouse, a surveyor was expelled from the property and state employees were subject to intimidation, she said.
“Ultimately, lives were lost — these were grandparents, neighbors and friends, and we know families are hurting,” she said.
Seven residents who were held at the warehouse have died; officials classified several of those deaths as “storm-related.”
All seven nursing homes are owned by Bob G. Dean Jr., a businessman in Baton Rouge. Efforts to reach Mr. Dean were not immediately successful. He previously suggested in a television interview that the number of deaths was not atypical.
“Normally with 850 people you’ll have a couple a day, so we did really good with taking care of people,” Mr. Dean told WAFB.
But the families of some of those residents have described conditions at the warehouse in Independence, La., as loud, dirty and uncomfortable. Residents slept on mattresses on the floor. They described the food as poor and said they were made to relieve themselves in five-gallon buckets.
State officials last week removed all the residents from the warehouse and relocated them to nursing homes; more than a dozen needed to be hospitalized.
Before Hurricane Ida made landfall, the state said, the warehouse appeared to meet minimum requirements for providing safe shelter “for a very short period of time.” There were plans for staffing, food service and laundry, potable water, portable toilets and a working generator appropriately sized for the site.
But conditions at the warehouse deteriorated following the storm, state officials said, and Mr. Dean did not alert the state or request help.
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