Lt. General Russel Honoré – commander of Joint Task Force Katrina – says Charity Hospital "could have been reopened" in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

In a recent interview with WWL's Dennis Woltering, Lt. General Honoré questioned state and local officials' decision to keep Charity closed after it was partially decontaminated three weeks after Hurricane Katrina.

His response supports the accounts of Dr. James Moises, Sgt. John Johnson, and others who helped clean the building during the chaotic aftermath of the storm.

It also helps corroborate photographic evidence obtained by SaveCharityHospital.com that shows a cleaned up Charity Hospital from September, 2005.

“It was capable of being reopened,” said Honoré.  “That’s my bottom line.  I've said that once, I’ve said it twice.”

Soon after Katrina, when the city only had an emergency trauma center in the Convention Center, Honore says he thought state and local officials would want to reopen the first few floors of Charity Hospital to provide improved health care.  But he says they told him no.

“What the state said was, we got it, but the plan is not to open it,” said Honoré. “I didn’t think much about it at the time because I didn’t know they were not going to ever open it again.”

Honoré says the state suggested it wasn't feasible to reopen Charity at the time.

“There was conversations about well if we turn the lights back on Charity, where are we going a staff from.  I mean all the doctors are gone, the nurses are gone.  And the people who would go there, the city's depopulated,” he said.  

Then he says he started hearing that the state officials were coming up with a different plan for Charity. Within weeks, state officials argued FEMA should pay full replacement cost $492 million because the hospital was more than 50 percent damaged.

  

It will be interesting to see how Lt. Gen. Honoré's recollection might bolster the chances of the plaintiffs in the LeBlanc case, which challenges the legality of LSU's decision to close Charity Hospital. Lawyers of LSU have maintained in court that the hurricane itself rendered Charity Hospital inoperable. That claim may finally prove to be unequivocally false.

Lt. General Honoré also excoriated state and city officials for continuing to hold off the construction of a new hospital - whether at Charity or on top of Lower Mid-City - because of blind reliance on FEMA compensation to which he says, since Charity was not damaged as badly as has been claimed, the state is not entitled.

“The state need to move on do their job and build a hospital or fix it and repair it or replace it and stop waiting for the federal government to do it.”

In May, he put it more bluntly, charging the state with abusing FEMA, using it "as a get-out-jail-free card."

"The state of Louisiana needs to pay for its own damn medical center," he said.

Honore had previously written that Hurricane Katrina had been "used as an opportunity to close the doors of Charity Hospital," hurting the city's poor residents.

The WWL report also features Staff Sgt. John Johnson, who was one of the members of the military who helped clean the lower floors of Charity after Katrina. You can see a more extensive account of his efforts here: