Healer lends a helping hand
West Sayville's Dr. Raymond Louis Ebarb aids hurricane victims in Louisiana
By Cary Maya
WEST SAYVILLE – Disasters can bring out the best in people. Amid devastation and destruction wrought by Mother Nature, we often find kindness and concern brought by people. Nowhere was this more evident than in the efforts of a local physician when he traveled to distant corners of the nation to help out fellow countrymen in need.
After filling out an online application with FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) in early September, Dr. Raymond Louis Ebarb, of West Sayville, got a phone call the following month from FEMA asking if he could be ready to travel in about two days. Upon arriving in New Orleans, he was transferred to a temporary staging area in Baton Rouge, La., where he spent two days while the agency prepared other accommodations.
“Louisiana’s my dad’s home state, so even though my family was unaffected in the northern part of the state, the hurricane was no longer just a news story,” Ebarb said. “I was awed by the devastation of nature but equally awed at the determination of the victims to put their lives together. It took a 1,500-mile airplane ride for me to appreciate what I do for a living.”
He was then assigned to Christus St. Patrick Hospital, where he worked in the emergency room—the only one open in the entire city of Lake Charles in western Louisiana.
“We were working, trying to help out the emergency room physicians,” Ebarb said. “We saw mostly simple stuff, things that didn’t need to be admitted to the hospital. Anybody that came in with something more life-threatening went to the regular emergency room.”
Ebarb saw many cases of sinus infections because of all the mold left by polluted water and reported that there were also instances of people unable to get hold of badly needed blood pressure and diabetes medications. Skin infections were common, along with a large number of skin abscesses and drug seekers on the rampage.
The physical devastation that littered the landscape stuck out in Ebarb’s recollection of his experiences—roofs blown off houses, trees knocked down, and boats run ashore. Entire piers were deformed, and all of downtown was boarded up, even though he was there an entire month after the first storm hit.
“You’d drive down the side of the road, and you’d see just plywood where someone’s home used to be,” Ebarb said. “There were just empty lots. It wasn’t even cinder or the remains of the house. It was amazing. Utter devastation.” There was even a problem with alligators in the trenches. “You’d see 10, 20 of them just while you were driving around the scene,” he noted.
The appreciation of the storm victims was not lost on Ebarb. “The people were just so grateful,” he said. “They were dumbfounded that someone would come down from New York to help them out down there.”
An Assistant Clinical Professor at Stony Brook Medical School’s Department of Medicine, Ebarb has hospital affiliations at Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center in West Islip as an attending physician and serves as Department Chair at Southside Hospital in Bay Shore.
His professional experience includes serving as the physician for the Sayville School District from 1989-2002 and as a staff doctor of Emergency Medicine at the now-closed Brunswick Hospital in Amityville.
“I was just glad to do all that I could down there,” said Ebarb, noting that his typical workdays are more hectic.
FEMA, a former independent agency that became part of the federal government’s new Department of Homeland Security in March 2003, is tasked with helping states handle declared disasters, including hurricanes, earthquakes, and other major catastrophes.
The agency employs more than 2,600 full-time workers at its Washington, D.C., headquarters and its regional offices across the nation, including the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center and the National Emergency Training Center in Emmitsburg, Maryland, with nearly 4,000 standby assistance employees available for deployment after disasters.
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