I-10 and Causeway Boulevard Interchange

The I-10 and Causeway Boulevard Interchange, a cloverleaf west of New Orleans, served during the Katrina response as both a helicopter staging point and an improvised reception area for people brought out of the flooded city. Designed to let rescue aircraft make quick trips in and out of the flood zone, the site exposed a crucial gap in the plan: evacuees could be delivered there without the transport, shelter, food, or water needed to move them farther to safety.

A transfer point in the rescue plan

The interchange was intended to function as a SARBOO, or search-and-rescue base of operations. The idea, discussed in the Hurricane Pam emergency exercise, was to use temporary landing points as intermediate stops: helicopters could drop off patients, then return quickly to the flood zone rather than spend hours carrying each person to a distant hospital. The interchange at Causeway Boulevard, just west of the city, offered a place for this rapid rotation.

But the plan depended on more than aircraft. Officials had not arranged the onward transportation required to clear people from the landing area. The response executed only half the SARBOO concept: the helicopters could bring people out, but the buses and drivers meant to carry them onward were missing. The scale of the shortfall was explicit—600 buses and 1,200 drivers had not been provided.

The interchange fills

Sandra LeBlanc and Mark LeBlanc reached the cloverleaf after traveling with firefighters from a fire station about forty miles from New Orleans. They had waited most of the day for the crews to be sent toward the city; when a small group of frustrated firefighters finally drove toward the triage point, the LeBlancs joined them. At the interchange, they encountered thousands of people sitting, standing, or lying among debris and light poles that had been knocked down to make room for helicopter landings. Aircraft descended and deposited more evacuees onto the grass.

The arrivals included people in urgent medical need, but the site had few resources for the crowd as a whole. Sandra LeBlanc found medical personnel and helped sort patients, examining injured and sick people, including diabetics who had lost limbs. She directed some toward ambulances bound for Baton Rouge. For most of the people gathered there, however, she could offer no immediate help. Many had spent a terrifying day and night on rooftops and needed shelter, food, and water. Emergency workers had hidden their own supplies in trailers, fearing that the limited provisions would be overwhelmed by demand. The landing zone could receive people faster than the response could support them.

A stalled hospital rescue

The interchange also became entangled in the effort to evacuate Memorial Medical Center and Lindy Boggs Medical Center. After rising floodwater was reported around the hospitals, a state EMS log designated them a high priority for evacuation. A volunteer, Carl Cramer, was dispatched from Baton Rouge to meet fifty-five boats and help evacuate both facilities. He never connected with the boats: he was told they had been stopped because of darkness and reports of snipers. He instead joined emergency workers at the Causeway Boulevard interchange.

When Vera LeBlanc’s sitter called Sandra LeBlanc from Memorial in the middle of the night, Sandra found Cramer and asked him to contact the command center by radio. She hoped officials would hear the sitter’s distress and focus on the people still inside the hospital. Yet Memorial was then being treated as a second priority. Sandra was told to go with the boats at sunrise, find a suitable launch point, and help empty the hospital. The planned meeting with the boats had already failed, leaving the interchange both a destination for displaced people and a place from which rescuers were still trying to organize the next step.

What the site revealed

The interchange’s role captured a recurring problem in the wider evacuation: extraction was not the same as rescue completed. Helicopters could bring people out of the flooded area, but without buses and drivers the transfer point became a place where evacuees waited among debris, with basic needs unmet and onward journeys uncertain. Meanwhile, the hospital evacuation effort depended on boats that never arrived as planned and on communications that did not reliably translate urgent reports into priority action.

As a setting, the cloverleaf brought together the response’s intended mechanics and its practical limits. It was conceived as a quick-turn staging area, yet it accumulated people faster than the system could provide transportation and care. Its distance from the flood zone made it useful to aircraft; its lack of onward capacity made clear how incomplete the larger rescue operation remained.