Surgeons in hard hats and hazmat suits help turn school to clinic

[Guest guest]

Surgeons in hard hats and hazmat suits help turn school to clinic

KATC 3 Lafayette, LA*

October 9, 2007

http://www.katc.com/global/story.asp?s=7190764

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The surgeons wore hard hats. Dust and mold hazed

the air, blackening their hazmat suits and filter masks. Their job

today was to gut a building, not sew up guts.

About 60 members of the American College of Surgeons, surgical

residents, and other people associated in one way or another with

the group's clinical meeting in New Orleans were working to turn a

building damaged by Hurricane Katrina into a medical clinic

Doctor Sylvia of Tampa, Florida, says she's never worn a

hard hat before but was glad to have it when part of the ceiling

fell on her head.

She was just back from eight days of surgical volunteering in Haiti,

where she had operated on 35 people.

In New Orleans, the surgeons are working in a building that once had

been a school run by St. Cecelia Catholic Church in the Bywater

neighborhood across the Industrial Canal from the Lower 9th Ward.

The church closed in 2001, but the building and its rectory were

renovated in 2004 and 2005 as a clinic for elderly people. The

clinic opened about a month before Hurricane Katrina flooded both

buildings in late August 2005.

It reopened in July 2006, aided by a three million dollar grant to

add a model neighborhood health clinic. Now, the plan is to expand

the clinic into the former school building where the people from the

surgical meeting were working.

About 200 are expected to take part through tomorrow.