Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport

Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport became a crucial but deeply strained extension of the evacuation from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Patients and exhausted hospital workers arrived expecting onward transport, while the airport’s concourses filled with people needing medical attention. Yet the federal medical response could not reliably match those needs: overwhelmed teams turned away unaffiliated clinicians, and many evacuees remained in the airport without dependable care. The airport thus marked not the end of the hospitals’ crisis but its transfer into a crowded, improvised setting.

An evacuation point without a clear onward route

Memorial Medical Center staff reached the airport after leaving the hospital by helicopter on Thursday evening. John Thiele had expected buses arranged by Tenet Healthcare to meet the group. None were there. He and his colleagues instead entered a concourse crowded with evacuees, including patients, and waited for hours amid uncertainty about how they would leave. Thiele lay on cardboard, using a military meal-ready-to-eat packet as a pillow. The next day, the small hospital group was caught in a shifting crowd while young National Guard members tried to impose order. A nurse fainted, and Thiele, though frightened himself, tried to steady his colleagues.

The group eventually boarded an Air Force cargo plane without being told where it was headed. They landed near San Antonio during a storm, where bags were inspected and the group waited on the tarmac in the rain. The journey shows how evacuation could carry hospital workers away from immediate danger without offering a predictable or coordinated passage to safety. The airport was one unsettled stage in that passage, not a secure endpoint.

Other Memorial evacuees had similarly uneven outcomes. The morning after the hospital’s last major push of patients, Karen Wynn flew to the airport and saw Rodney Scott sitting in his wheelchair in a paper gown, with no one attending to him. Many patients moved out of Memorial the previous evening had not travelled far. By contrast, an injured intensive-care nurse had been flown directly to a hospital in Baton Rouge at the insistence of Roy Culotta and another doctor. The differing destinations made the transfer system’s unevenness visible: one patient could be left waiting at the airport while another received direct hospital care.

A concourse becomes a medical ward

The airport received hundreds of patients from New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes, alongside thousands of evacuees separated from medications for conditions including hypertension, diabetes, and schizophrenia. Some patients needed oxygen, respiratory therapists, or ventilators; the concourse also held people recovering from major operations. With patients distributed across litters, wheelchairs, and airport seating, the ordinary function of the terminal gave way to an improvised mass-care setting. Yet the people arriving there still needed the medicines, monitoring, and continuing treatment that evacuation alone could not provide.

The available workforce was exhausted. Doctors, nurses, and paramedics had already worked for more than two days, and they struggled amid the pressure of the arrivals. Federal Disaster Medical Assistance Teams were operating at the airport, but their members were not authorized under the procedures described to work with unvetted outsiders. There was no effective system for quickly confirming whether a volunteer clinician was qualified. As a result, John Thiele and a nurse who offered their help were turned away, even while the teams were overwhelmed. The restriction addressed a genuine problem—determining who could safely provide care—but, in this emergency, it also kept experienced medical workers from assisting.

Unequal passage and institutional failures

Susan Mulderick’s account of leaving Memorial distinguishes the airport’s role from that of other evacuation sites. After a harrowing journey, she and colleagues spent a day at the crowded New Orleans Lakefront Airport, where they were asked to care for people. A sympathetic official moved them onto a plane ahead of people who had waited longer; they feared the crowd might attack them rather than be left behind. Meanwhile, some Memorial executives had been taken by helicopter to a nearby Tenet hospital, given a meal and a room, and then transported onward by helicopter and private jet. These were different routes through the evacuation, but together they show how access to onward transport and respite varied sharply.

The airport’s medical disarray became part of a larger critique of federal disaster response. A congressional report described confusion over command arrangements and characterized the medical effort there as chaotic. It noted that people were dying while doctors outside the federal teams, including Thiele, were refused entry to assist. The report also described the practice of separating the sickest patients so they could die apart from others. The airport therefore exposed a conflict between formal control of medical personnel and the urgent need to expand care during a mass evacuation.

Aftermath and significance

The institutional arrangements behind the response had recently changed. After the September 11 attacks, the National Disaster Medical System, which includes the Disaster Medical Assistance Teams, had been moved from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. After Katrina, it was returned to Health and Human Services, whose emergency role included coordinating federal health resources. The airport crisis became evidence in the assessment of whether the structure and coordination of those resources were adequate.

The book also traces efforts to address weaknesses revealed by Katrina. Later changes included reorganizing supply and resupply processes and using smaller teams to respond more flexibly during Superstorm Sandy. Those broader developments do not erase what happened at the airport: patients arrived there after being moved from hospitals, clinicians willing to help could be excluded, and staff and evacuees remained caught in a confused chain of onward movement. Its significance lies in that reversal. The airport was supposed to carry people out of danger, but for many, arrival there began another period of uncertainty and unmet medical need.