Charity Hospital patient evacuation during Katrina

The evacuation of Charity Hospital during Hurricane Katrina became a striking counterpoint to the patient-removal decisions at other New Orleans hospitals. Charity faced flooding, lost essential services, endured violence and communication failures, and took longer to clear than Memorial Medical Center. Yet fewer than ten patients died, staff continued caring for patients in their rooms, and leaders sent the sickest out first rather than placing them last as beyond rescue.

Conditions and Course of the Evacuation

Charity Hospital was a public hospital with two campuses and roughly twice as many patients as Memorial, while operating with a lower staff-to-patient ratio. It had flooded and lost power, functioning plumbing, computers, telephones, and elevators. It had no helipad and no corporate overseers to coordinate assistance, even belatedly. The transfer of all its patients was not completed until Friday afternoon, September 2, a day after Memorial’s evacuation was completed on Thursday, September 1.

The prolonged evacuation unfolded amid threats that made ordinary hospital work precarious. A gunman was reported on a nearby roof, disrupting the operation. More than a hundred psychiatric patients were inside; people urinated on stair landings. Convoys trying to reach the hospital across floodwater were reportedly shot at and looted, while news reports wrongly suggested the hospital had already been evacuated. Soldiers also brought additional ventilator-dependent patients to Charity. The hospital was therefore not simply emptying its wards: it was responding to new arrivals while trying to move people already in its care.

Preparation and Improvised Power

Before Katrina, hospital officials had drilled for a Category Three hurricane and levee failure. With federal preparedness funds made available after the September 11 attacks, they had purchased portable generators, oxygen-powered ventilators, and a ham-radio system; security officers had also received special disaster training. The equipment did not remove the crisis, but it gave staff resources they could adapt when the hospital’s normal systems failed.

Workers siphoned gasoline from cars to fuel ten small portable generators. They used them to run ventilators and cardiac monitors in the intensive-care units, sustaining critically ill patients, including a very premature baby. That response differed sharply from the situation at Memorial Medical Center, where staff hand-ventilated patients with Ambu bags after the power failed, while two similar generators were later used for lights and fans in common areas and at the helipad rather than for medical equipment. The contrast makes the generators’ significance concrete: at Charity, improvised fuel and equipment kept life-support devices operating.

Maintaining Care and Order

Staff continued treating patients in their rooms despite the danger. Hospital leaders held meetings every four hours in the lobby, bringing together workers from doctors to janitorial staff. The hospital also staged a talent show by flashlight; employees painted and laughed. These were not substitutes for supplies or safe conditions, but they helped sustain morale and a shared sense of work amid uncertainty.

The staff also preserved elements of ordinary hospital routine. Physical and occupational therapy continued, and workers were encouraged to keep their shifts and maintain regular sleep schedules. By signaling that some structure remained, these practices helped keep panic down. Leaders actively tried to stop rumors, telling staff, “You can only say it if you’ve seen it.” In a setting where reports of danger and even reports that the hospital had been evacuated could not be trusted, that instruction made firsthand knowledge a rule for communication.

Triage and Significance

The evacuation’s defining decision was not to label a group of patients too ill to rescue. Charity’s leaders sent the sickest patients out first. This stood in direct contrast to the Memorial Medical Center decision to place patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders last: that order concerns whether to attempt resuscitation after a patient’s heart or breathing stops, but at Memorial it became a reason to defer evacuation. Charity’s approach did not erase scarcity or danger; it refused to treat a patient’s severity of illness as a reason to abandon the effort to get that patient out.

The book places Charity alongside Memorial, Lindy Boggs, and Touro to show that hospitals confronting the same disaster did not respond identically. Charity’s smaller death toll came in spite of its longer evacuation, greater patient load, and severe operational failures. Preparedness, working equipment, institutional routines, and the refusal to pre-classify the sickest as unrecoverable formed a distinct response to the crisis. The account does not present those measures as making the evacuation safe or easy; it shows how decisions about organization and triage shaped what staff could continue doing under extreme conditions.