Lindy Boggs Medical Center’s Katrina evacuation

Lindy Boggs Medical Center’s Katrina evacuation exposed the difference between a plan for moving people and a rescue that could reach them. Floodwater, limited communications, and the absence of a helipad shaped the hospital’s options; triage decisions then determined who would leave first and who would wait. The evacuation ultimately became a story not only of delayed assistance, but also of staff members who stayed after others escaped and of patients whose survival depended on improvised efforts.

Conditions and the First Evacuations

The conditions at Lindy Boggs resembled those at Memorial Medical Center: power was out, communications were nearly absent, and rescue was delayed. Water had poured over the hospital’s floodgates. Unlike Memorial, Lindy Boggs had no helipad, and there was no assurance that ambulances would be waiting a boat ride away on dry ground. Staff initially ferried only able-bodied people who were not patients, leaving the transfer of patients dependent on boats and coordination with rescuers.

On Wednesday, firefighters arrived and directed drivers of small dinghies and pleasure boats to carry patients to a berm near a post office, where helicopters could pick them up. The roughly 150 patients were divided into categories A, B, and C. Some doctors and nurses believed that the C patients, the most critical, should be rescued first. The doctors and firefighters overseeing the operation instead put them last, apparently concerned that medical care might not be available at the drop-off points. Asked by Dateline reporter Hoda Kotb to explain the protocol, firefighter Chris Shamburger offered little more than the assertion that this was how the process was done.

The categories were not merely abstractions: staff marked patients’ foreheads with permanent marker. Acting chief of staff Glenn Johnson recalled feeling troubled by the practice, which made people appear to be marked like cattle. He made an exception for a paralyzed patient whose husband offered to carry her, changing her designation from C to A. Johnson described the decision as his one act of mercy that day. Staff also carried patients down multiple flights of stairs in sheets, a practical response to a building where ordinary routes and equipment could not make evacuation straightforward.

Rescue Interrupted and Staff Left Behind

The firefighters were instructed to retreat before sundown because of safety concerns. They left critical, hospice, and long-term acute-care patients behind and did not return. A handful of medical staff and other rescuers came back on Thursday, September 1, and began taking survivors out in a small, stolen flatboat; other patients were evacuated on Friday. The return of a few rescuers did not erase the interruption: the people still inside had already been separated from the operation that was supposed to carry them to safety.

The escape of most of the staff raised a separate concern. At the suggestion of fire officials, nearly all of the 175 staff members who got out had put on gowns and marked themselves with the C triage symbol so they could be evacuated by military helicopter as if they were patients. Photographs showed colleagues grinning in loosely worn gowns, with bright red letters on their chests, hands, and foreheads. The images made the expedient visible, while also sharpening the question of what would happen to the actual patients left behind.

A respiratory therapist asked that question and was told that, at some point, someone would have to euthanize the patients. Anesthesiologist James Riopelle rejected the idea as unreasonable. He believed rescue would eventually become possible and that the hospital was not about to sink; he also knew there was dry ground nearby and drinking water at the facility. Earlier, he had already chosen to disobey the order to leave because he would not abandon the roughly sixty or seventy pets in the hospital, including his own. Two other staff members with pets—a nurse director and a respiratory therapist—stayed with him.

Once the rescuers had departed, Riopelle and his two colleagues found themselves with the pets and roughly twenty-five extremely fragile patients, many of them with DNR orders. Some patients died. Riopelle moved three bodies to the hospital entrance in an attempt to deter looters. His decision to stay had been made to protect the animals; the evacuation’s failure to take all patients left him and his colleagues facing a much larger responsibility than the one that had prompted that choice.

Unequal Risks and Contrasting Accounts

The episode shows how evacuation depended on more than a patient’s medical condition. A person’s place in the triage categories, the availability of transport, and whether rescuers could reach the hospital all affected the chance of leaving. Johnson’s change to one paralyzed patient’s category illustrates how an individual judgment could alter a person’s immediate prospects within a system that otherwise placed the most critical patients last. The patients who remained after the firefighters withdrew had no equivalent assurance that the next rescue would arrive soon.

The book places Lindy Boggs alongside the wider transportation failures around New Orleans. Residents without cars had been directed toward the Superdome, while the city’s transport plans had serious gaps. Acadian’s ambulances were overwhelmed, and many were stuck in interstate traffic; some began taking patients to the Superdome rather than out of town. These conditions help explain why hospitals could not rely on ordinary transport, but they do not make the decisions inside any one hospital inevitable. The evacuation was part of a broader emergency in which limited vehicles, delayed coordination, and uncertain destinations repeatedly narrowed people’s options.

The account of Lindy Boggs also changes according to what the reporting foregrounds. Dateline emphasized Johnson’s anguish, the shortage of outside help, his efforts to replenish medicines, and the strain of working in extreme heat. Anna Pou, who watched the program, thought it helped viewers understand the pressures on doctors trapped in a hospital and led some people close to her to recognize what she had faced. That sympathetic account treated the flooding as the central enemy. Virginia Rider had assisted in the initial investigation, however, and the criminal inquiry later focused on the staff’s escape and on patients left behind. The two accounts do not describe identical questions: one stressed the ordeal of medical workers, while the investigation examined what happened after most staff had escaped.

Aftermath and Institutional Contrast

Lindy Boggs did not stand alone in the book’s account of hospital evacuations. At Charity Hospital, conditions were comparable or worse: flooding, loss of power and communications, no helipad, and additional ventilator-dependent patients brought in by soldiers. The hospital took until Friday afternoon, September 2, to transfer all its patients, later than Memorial Medical Center, and had about twice as many patients across its two campuses with fewer staff in proportion. Yet fewer than ten patients died there. Charity staff described continuing bedside care and maintaining morale through regular lobby meetings, a flashlight talent show, painting, and laughter. The contrast does not by itself explain the different outcomes, but it prevents Lindy Boggs’s failures from being treated as an unavoidable consequence of the storm alone.

The evacuation’s significance lies in the distance between being assigned a category and actually being rescued. Patients marked for later evacuation remained dependent on boats, firefighters, and decisions made under pressure; when the firefighters withdrew, the designation did not offer protection. The later inquiry and the contrasting account of Charity Hospital widened the story beyond one difficult triage choice, toward the institutional decisions, rescue arrangements, and care practices that determined who was still waiting when help stopped.