Evacuation of Memorial Patients by National Guard Truck

The Evacuation of Memorial Patients by National Guard Truck was a limited but consequential road evacuation from Memorial Medical Center during the flooding after Hurricane Katrina. As water rose around the hospital, staff moved patients onto an open troop hauler and sent them toward a hospital in Nacogdoches, Texas. The scene made the narrowing possibilities of rescue tangible: the truck could still pass, but its platform stood only slightly above the water.

Rising Water and Uneven Information

By midafternoon, floodwater had climbed partway up the sloping emergency-room ramp, where a camouflage-green United States National Guard troop hauler waited. Patients came out of the emergency department in wheelchairs or with walkers, guided toward the vehicle by hospital staff. The rising water made road evacuation time-sensitive; the truck bed was not much higher than the surrounding water, and the account notes that only a limited window remained to move patients by road.

The evacuation unfolded amid an information crisis as well as a physical one. Earlier, WWL Radio repeatedly broadcast an announcement by the president of neighboring Jefferson Parish that martial law had been declared, although no such declaration had been made. At the same time, reports of actual flooding conveyed the danger directly: a caller named Freddy described being trapped with four other people, including a baby, in an attic in the Gentilly neighborhood near Lake Pontchartrain, surrounded by about nine feet of water while it continued to rise. The juxtaposition of unverified claims and specific pleas for help shows how difficult it was to assess the emergency through the broadcasts reaching the hospital.

Loading and Departure

Anna Pou worked with her colleagues as they loaded about a dozen people onto the truck's open bed. Patients sat close together on simple metal benches beneath a green metal frame. Hospital security personnel in blue bulletproof vests helped lift them onto the chest-high platform, and several nurses climbed aboard to accompany the patients out of the city. The nurses' presence connected the transport to ongoing care, even as the hospital's usual medical setting gave way to a crowded vehicle exposed to the flood.

At about four in the afternoon, the truck's large wheels churned through the water, passed downed crepe myrtle trees in front of the old hospital building, and headed west. Hospital leaders had arranged for the patients to be accepted by a hospital in Nacogdoches, Texas. They planned to send twenty-seven additional patients there when a second truck arrived, making clear that this first departure was part of a larger effort rather than a completed evacuation.

A Narrow Route Out

The truck evacuation was one stage in a crisis that continued around Memorial. At about ten that night, another stabbing victim waded to the emergency-room ramp and was brought inside for treatment before needing air evacuation. The helicopters taking people out of the hospital complex were visible to others seeking refuge, and a Memorial employee reported that people were moving through three feet of water toward the hospital. Staff secured exits; families who arrived by boat were given food and told that no more patients were being evacuated, with the Superdome offered as an alternative despite troubling reports about conditions there.

Radio accounts later carried alarming stories of hostage situations, prison breaks, armed looters, and a possible shark near a hotel; the shark report itself was uncertain. Those reports formed part of the wider atmosphere surrounding the hospital, but they should not be confused with the documented conditions of the truck departure: rising water, patients who needed assistance to reach the vehicle, and an arranged destination waiting in Texas.

The Event in Retrospect

The evacuation's significance lies in both its practical achievement and its limits. Staff and security personnel moved a group of patients out while the route remained passable, and nurses accompanied them. Yet the small first load, the dependence on another truck for twenty-seven more patients, and the shallow clearance between truck bed and floodwater all measure how precarious road transport had become.

Later television coverage of the Memorial deaths would recast the hospital crisis through the language of alleged criminality. On CNN, Nancy Grace repeatedly pressed the image of an “angel of death” and cut off a guest who began describing the loss of power, rising fears, and delayed rescue that preceded the injections. That retrospective framing differed sharply from the immediate logistical scene of the truck evacuation, where staff were moving patients through floodwater toward an identified receiving hospital.