Bob Smith

Bob Smith, Tenet Healthcare’s regional senior vice president, emerged as a key corporate contact during the attempted evacuation of Memorial Medical Center. As the hospital’s patients and staff faced worsening conditions, Smith tried to assemble transport from improvised leads: boats, state resources, advice from a corporate competitor, and ultimately a private aviation-services company. His efforts helped put helicopters in motion, but they unfolded amid delayed coordination, conflicting evacuation priorities, and a company that had not prepared to conduct a rescue operation.

Role and Crisis Context

On Wednesday morning, Smith reached Cynthia Matherne, who was working at New Orleans’s emergency operations center. By then, she believed that private resources offered the best hope of rapidly evacuating private hospitals. The proposal startled Smith: Tenet had no experience organizing rescues, no corporate helicopters, and no disaster plan prepared before the storm. Its corporate jet could not land on a hospital rooftop. While the company tried to establish a command center in a ground-floor conference room, Smith and his colleagues were receiving advice by telephone from Tenet’s regional chief medical officer, who was on vacation in Oregon and speaking over a speakerphone.

The distance between the scale of the emergency and Tenet’s available capacity was apparent in the first options Smith wrote down. His notes included boats, the state wildlife-and-fisheries department’s swamp boats, staging, and pontoon boats. These were not components of an established evacuation system; they were possibilities assembled in conversation with Matherne. Smith’s list records a corporate response being formed while the emergency was already under way.

Searching for Transport

Matherne told Smith that Tulane University Hospital’s parent company, Hospital Corporation of America, had begun hiring helicopters on Tuesday, when flooding made the danger clear. Smith contacted the competing company for advice. Its executives wished him luck, explaining that contracting privately owned helicopters and bringing them into the disaster zone had taken time, and that communication problems in New Orleans had made the process harder. The exchange offered a precedent but no quick solution: arranging air transport required time and coordination that the crisis had already consumed.

Smith then asked Michael Arvin about a message Arvin had received from an air-logistics company in a Dallas suburb. The company had offered assistance the previous night. Smith directed Arvin to call. The contact proved productive: Tenet began arranging helicopters, and by just before ten o’clock Wednesday night the aviation-services company had confirmed signed contracts for six aircraft of different sizes. They were expected to converge on New Orleans early Thursday, with one due as early as six in the morning. Although ordinarily used for firefighting and other work, Tenet planners began calling them air ambulances.

Conflicting Priorities and the Hospital’s Condition

Smith’s conversations also exposed uncertainty about where Memorial stood in the wider rescue effort. On Tuesday evening, state emergency medical officials had reportedly made its evacuation a top priority. By Wednesday morning, however, Matherne told Smith that Memorial ranked among the lowest of eight local hospitals on her list. Tenet later discovered a separate list maintained by state public-health officials, on which Memorial was sixth among seven hospitals. The evidence establishes the competing rankings, not that Smith controlled them; their divergence illustrates the fragmented system in which he was trying to find assistance.

The information reaching Smith from Memorial made delay seem especially dangerous. In an email to Tenet leaders, he summarized what he said he had learned through high-frequency radio: 115 patients remained in the hospital, including 30 who were bedbound and more than 40 confined to wheelchairs; he reported that as many as 60 were fragile and might die within twenty-four hours. Arvin conveyed similarly grave assessments to colleagues offering help. Smith’s report turned the hospital’s situation into an urgent corporate priority: getting patients, employees, and families out.

The Limits of the Response

Tenet’s requests for flight clearances presented one account of what the helicopters were needed to do. Officials were told that the company would rescue its own patients. Yet a Tenet vice president also told a senator’s staff that the immediate need was to remove roughly 800 community members who had taken refuge at Memorial, and that boats were needed for them. The difference mattered: the hospital’s evacuation involved not only patients under medical care but also local residents sheltering inside. The requests moved through a chain of corporate and public contacts, with the senator offering to approach the governor on the hospitals’ behalf.

Security concerns further shaped Tenet’s messages. Smith wrote to a Navy captain that the company’s last communication indicated security problems involving local citizens and that the situation was becoming critical without security. Such concerns formed part of the response being communicated to officials, even as the available evidence emphasizes that transport and evacuation coordination remained central problems.

Smith’s role was consequential but bounded. He gathered information, opened channels to other organizations, and helped turn an unsolicited offer into contracts for six helicopters. The episode does not show him directing the rescue as a whole or resolving the competing public and private priorities. Instead, his actions trace the improvised corporate effort to assist a hospital whose danger had become acute, while revealing how little preparation, equipment, and reliable coordination Tenet had brought to the emergency.