Acadian Ambulance

Acadian Ambulance, the region’s largest ambulance company, became one of the principal transport providers during the Hurricane Katrina crisis. Its crews and dispatchers faced demands far beyond the available vehicles and usable routes: ambulances were trapped in traffic, patients were redirected to a shelter rather than taken out of the city, and medical air transport depended on improvised coordination among hospitals, private operators, and public rescuers. At Memorial Medical Center, Acadian’s work helped move critically ill patients, but the company’s resources could not overcome the fragmented decisions and changing priorities that shaped the evacuation.

Regional transport under pressure

As evacuation orders took effect, dispatchers for Acadian Ambulance were overwhelmed by calls to move patients from threatened hospitals, nursing homes, and private homes. The company made roughly two dozen ambulances available, but many were stuck on the interstate with other evacuees. The traffic jam turned transport into a scarce resource: some ambulances began taking patients to the Superdome, designated as a shelter of last resort, instead of attempting to carry them out of the city. The shift was a practical response to blocked roads, but it also meant that an ambulance trip did not necessarily bring a patient closer to safety beyond New Orleans.

The scale of need had been foreseeable. About 2,500 hospital patients remained in the city as Katrina approached, while planning exercises had not resolved how such a population could be moved through flood conditions. Acadian’s dispatchers were dealing with requests across hospitals, care facilities, and homes in a region where road access was already failing. The company’s experience shows the distinction between having vehicles available and having a functioning evacuation system: ambulances could be assigned, yet traffic, distance, and coordination determined whether they could reach patients or complete a transfer.

Mobilization at Memorial

At Memorial, administrators faced the prospect of moving nearly two hundred patients before power failed. Susan Mulderick sought additional ambulances and helicopters from Acadian, as well as other outside assistance. She also contacted her former husband, who worked for a helicopter-transport company, to ask whether it could bring in medication and fly out patients. He replied that his firm had already been hired to evacuate Tulane Hospital and gave her the number of an Air National Guard major coordinating civil and military evacuation efforts. The exchange captured a larger constraint: transport providers were being assigned across several hospitals at once, while Memorial had to find a place within a rapidly evolving response.

An Acadian flight coordinator arrived at Memorial with several small medical helicopters as he moved among hospitals evacuating critical patients. He found the helipad disorderly compared with other sites. Nurses were trying to flag down aircraft, crowds had gathered to watch, and the coordinator’s cooler of sandwiches for flight crews was quickly emptied by staff and people on the tarmac. The scene was not simply a shortage of aircraft; it was also a problem of managing access to them. A nurse who was an Air Force captain offered her flight-line experience, and Richard Deichmann put her in charge of the helipad. She moved doctors and patients away from the landing area and cleared the rooftops so pilots could approach safely.

The dispute over where a helicopter would take Memorial’s last group of critically ill babies further exposed the limits of improvised coordination. The pilot’s flight plan named a hospital west of Baton Rouge, not the hospital that had agreed to receive the infants. The neonatal nurses objected because they did not know whether the alternate destination could support the babies’ needs. The nursing director insisted that the pilot obtain approval to fly to Baton Rouge before she would allow the babies to leave. The plan was changed, and a later message confirmed that the infants arrived safely. Acadian’s aircraft operated within a chain of decisions in which clinical staff, hospital leaders, and pilots each held knowledge essential to the transfer.

Flights, fog, and a suspended evacuation

Before fog made flying difficult, sixteen critically ill babies and most of Memorial’s critically ill adult patients had been flown out, twenty-five patients in all, along with a stabbing victim. The Acadian flight coordinator did not plan to return with the growing fleet of private medical air ambulances on Wednesday. The crews’ assignment was to evacuate critically ill people with a reasonable chance of survival, and he understood that this work at Memorial had been completed. Other hospitals were still waiting for help. After packing his satellite phone and waiting for the fog to pass, he looked for a helicopter that could take him to Tulane Hospital; he did not want to remain overnight at Memorial, whose dark emergency room seemed dangerous to him, and he had only his .45 pistol.

Around eleven that night, a Coast Guard Jayhawk arrived at Memorial on a search-and-rescue mission to begin evacuating the remaining patients. Someone on the helipad told its crew that no patients needed to leave and that the helicopter should return after daylight. The flight mechanic relayed that information, and the aircraft was authorized to fly to Tulane Hospital with the Acadian coordinator and about a thousand pounds of medical equipment removed from private helicopters to make room for patients. It left Memorial without a patient aboard. The decision did not mean that everyone in the building had been evacuated: all fifty-two LifeCare patients, including seven ventilator-dependent patients, remained on the seventh floor.

A later rescue attempt showed how much depended on flight time, fuel, and a workable handoff. A patient who had required a Code Blue resuscitation en route to the helipad needed to reach a hospital in Baton Rouge, but the Jayhawk had spent so long on the pad that it lacked enough fuel to fly there directly. A doctor threatened to leave the patient on the helipad if she could not board. The rescuers arranged to take her to the Coast Guard New Orleans Air Station for transfer to another aircraft; a LifeCare nurse accompanied her. They departed Memorial at 5:15 a.m. Inside the helicopter, the nurse appeared too frightened to care for the patient, so the Coast Guard rescue swimmer and a freelance cameraman took over. The patient made it through the transfer. This episode was not an Acadian flight, but it unfolded in the same strained evacuation network in which private medical aircraft, Coast Guard crews, hospital staff, and patients had to be connected one transfer at a time.

Conflicting accounts and the limits of coordination

Later testimony and recollections differ over when LifeCare sought help and what assistance had been offered. Susan Mulderick said that Sandra Cordray asked LifeCare whether it needed assistance and that LifeCare initially said it was working through its corporate or management structure. Acadian’s Keith Brisbois recalled arriving at LifeCare soon after the evacuation decision to offer help, and being surprised to hear that its staff were waiting for corporate direction about a transportation contract he believed Acadian held. Text and email communications indicate that LifeCare personnel later requested evacuation assistance from Memorial, Tenet, and Acadian. Together, these accounts describe not a single settled chain of command but overlapping assumptions about who had requested, arranged, or was responsible for transport.

Acadian’s role is also present in the record through later accounts of its regional operation. Colleagues coordinated from the company’s base in Lafayette, Louisiana, while medical helicopters moved among hospitals. A later description of aerial footage identified a green Air Med helicopter on Memorial’s helipad, though the displayed time was considered incorrect in light of the sunlight and shadows, and the video’s precise timing remained uncertain. Reports that presidential airspace restrictions had grounded rescue flights were also not confirmed by the author’s review of flight restrictions; Acadian field training officer Marc Creswell recalled that medical aircraft had been unable to fly during part of the president’s presence in the area, while later accounts may have conflated separate visits.

The company’s work was therefore both essential and bounded. Acadian could dispatch ambulances, bring medical helicopters to hospitals, and coordinate transport across the region, but it could not itself clear interstate traffic, resolve hospitals’ competing evacuation plans, or ensure that every patient was recognized as still needing rescue. At Memorial, the contrast between twenty-five patients flown out and the LifeCare patients left inside made the limits of the transport system stark: aircraft and crews mattered, but so did the decisions that determined who was ready to board, where they would be taken, and whether another flight would return.