'Warehouse of death': FEMA Camp Death toll climbs to 6

INDEPENDENCE – Multiple agencies are now involved in an investigation into a massive, makeshift shelter where hundreds of nursing home residents were crammed into tight living spaces to ride out Hurricane Ida. Four people died at the facility in the days following the storm, and more than a dozen were sent to the hospital.

Friday, the WBRZ Investigative Unit spoke to a resident who was in the warehouse and described the conditions.

"It was a warehouse of death...hot, stuffy, smelly, scary, and dangerous," resident Wade Heaton said. "We only got fed once a day if we were lucky."

Heaton recalled staff telling them they needed to pack enough clothes for three days to escape Ida's wrath. The home he was staying in was located in New Orleans.

"It was one of the most inhumane, I kept thinking I was in limbo," Heaton said. "What time it was. What day it was. Sometimes we'd get answers. What it reminded me of was concentration camps of World War II."

Day-long rescues unfolded Thursday at the factory warehouse that a Baton Rouge businessman tried to use as a shelter.

State regulators told the WBRZ Investigative Unit Thursday that more than 800 nursing home residents from seven facilities in Orleans, Lafourche, Jefferson and Terrebonne parishes were taken to the Independence warehouse in Tangipahoa Parish. The nursing home managers were hoping to turn the facility into a mass shelter. Four of the 850 people there died; 14 others needed medical attention and 850 were rescued Wednesday and Thursday.