New Orleans doctor answers call to serve after hurricane

Key points:

• Dr. Susan Berry was leaving New Orleans with her family to escape Hurricane Katrina, but she felt called to stay and help during the public health crisis that followed.
• She was asked to go to Lake Charles to direct a special-needs shelter, which then had to relocate to Shreveport ahead of Hurricane Rita.
• Since it all happened, Berry said every day she is determined to squeeze something good out of her experience

Dr. Susan Berry and her husband, Dr. Richard Oberhelman, both retired pediatricians, were leaving New Orleans to escape Hurricane Katrina with their three children and several pets when they started hearing about the public health crisis in Louisiana because of the pending hurricane.

“They were calling for doctors, and I said to my husband, ‘We can’t ignore this. This is the biggest health crisis in history as far as public health crisis and we are both in public health,’” Berry recalled.

As director for children with special health care needs, she was asked to go to Lake Charles to direct a special-needs shelter.

The family drove to Lake Charles, over 200 miles from New Orleans. A Lake Charles family who wanted to help offered to share their house. It was a bonus that the husband was a veterinarian and housed their pets at his practice.

“I was pretty much living at the shelter with 24 hours on and 24 hours off,” Berry said.

The shelter was in the Stokes Auditorium of McNeese University in Lake Charles.

“The special-needs shelters were part of disaster planning for the state,” she said. The shelter was put together on the spot with cots, nurses and doctors who could meet the needs of people with disabilities and chronic medical conditions — the types of needs that prohibit them from general shelters.

“During the two-and-a-half weeks in Lake Charles, our kids got settled in school and our son got to play on a Division V football team at the local high school. He even made a tackle on the field (his first)!”

After almost a week in the city, a physician offered the family a vacant house to stay in because all the hotels were full of evacuees.

“Richard took me to see it after a very late shift. It was beautiful but had no furniture and smelled. I thought it would never work,” she said. “But that Labor Day weekend, five families got together, cleaned the house and donated furniture, beds, linens, and even filled the fridge for us.”

There were daily conference calls with the state’s medical team. When it looked like Hurricane Rita was aiming for Lake Charles, she was asked to move the Lake Charles shelter almost 200 miles to Shreveport.

“When asked if I would take the shelter to Shreveport and direct it, I said (I would do it) for a week. My kids just got into school, and we are settled in Lake Charles.”

But when Rita hit — 26 days after Katrina — it blew the roof off the shelter and put a large hole in the roof of the house that was donated to the family.

“Richard and the kids had to find a hotel in Shreveport while I led the caravan from the Lake Charles shelter to the Civic Center in Bossier City,” she said.

“Now, talk about living on a prayer. I had some good volunteer doctors with me and we lead this caravan from Lake Charles to Shreveport with six ambulances and six school buses loaded with patients and medical staff.

“There were two doctors in the front — praying the whole time.”

She directed that shelter until her husband called with a desperate plea: “I’ve been living in this hotel room with three kids, two dogs, a cat and two gerbils. I can’t take it anymore.”

Berry found a volunteer replacement to take over the Shreveport shelter after about 18 days.

They returned to the Lake Charles house to collect their things. Hurricane Rita had torn big sections off the roof, exposing the house to the outside.

“We slept in the house for one night, with no electricity, and ate at a food pantry set up by a local church,” she said.

Oberhelman found a house one of his faculty members offered on Prytania Street in New Orleans. They stayed there about six weeks until their family home got its electrical power restored.

“Our house was ready to move into with no gas, but it was livable, two days before Thanksgiving,” she said. “We borrowed four space heaters to keep warm.” The family came back to their home church of Rayne Memorial United Methodist.

Berry said she still has flashbacks of that time in Shreveport.

“I remember every time a bus of patients would arrive from the shelter, they’d say, ‘OK, the alive patients are in the front, and the dead bodies are in the back. Where’s your nearest morgue?’

“I mean, it was that graphic. After a while, you got immune and act like you do in an ER.”

Since it all happened, Berry said every day she is determined to squeeze something good out of her experience — and there have been some good things.

She is still a member of Rayne Memorial and was on the outreach committee during the time of the storm.

She was a professor at Louisiana State University in New Orleans until she retired in 2021. Her clinical practice was in developmental pediatrics. She has a master’s in Public Health and over the years held director positions in public health, first in the New Orleans Health Department and then the Louisiana Office of Public Health, both as contracts from LSU. She was the director for the state’s Children with Special Health Care Needs programs.

Oberhelman is a pediatrician and professor in the Tulane School of Public Health and is the associate dean for Global Health.

Gilbert is a freelance writer in Nashville, Tennessee, who covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for UM News in 2005.

News media contact: Julie Dwyer at [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digests.