Memorial Medical Center Helistop

Memorial Medical Center Helistop was a rooftop landing platform whose promise of rapid access collided with the practical failures of a flooded, powerless hospital. During the evacuation, its surface proved strong enough to take a heavy military helicopter, but the route to it was slow, its markings were obsolete, and the arrival of aircraft did not guarantee that patients could be moved safely or promptly. The helipad became both a rescue point and a measure of the wider breakdown surrounding it.

Construction and changing function

The Helistop stood on the Magnolia Street parking garage on the southwest side of the hospital campus, 114 feet above sea level. Opened with fanfare in 1985, it was promoted as a time-saving, potentially lifesaving logistical improvement. The project extended the garage elevator two floors upward so that patients could travel directly from the emergency room and the sixth-floor maternity unit to the landing platform. Pilots could switch on landing lights remotely by setting their VHF radios to a designated frequency and pulsing their microphone switches; the signal was meant to alert hospital staff to prepare for an arrival. The design allowed landings by day or night in most weather.

That convenience depended on electricity. The garage elevators were not connected to the backup electrical system, so when utility power failed they could no longer carry patients from inside the hospital to the roof. The landing lights also depended on electricity. A facility designed around direct access had thus lost the essential systems that made direct access possible. The Helistop remained physically present, but the hospital could no longer use its intended route to reach it.

Its physical condition raised a separate concern. Hospital administrators and others climbed the garage stairs to inspect the platform, whose deterioration left engineers unsure whether it could safely bear a helicopter. It had once been rated to accommodate aircraft weighing up to 20,000 pounds, but the hospital had recently spent more than $100,000 in repairs merely to keep the structure from collapsing onto the eight-story garage below. The platform’s age, uncertain strength, and failed access systems made it an unreliable asset even before the evacuation began.

A landing and a broken route

Anesthesiologist Paul Primeaux had no surgical duties in the emergency conditions and joined the inspection group out of curiosity. After the others left, he remained on the platform. From there he could see floodwater across the Freret neighborhood, the Mississippi River to the south, and the damaged roof of the New Orleans Superdome in the distance. When he heard helicopter rotors, he looked up and casually waved at a dark-olive military aircraft marked with the number 585. He had not meant to signal it, but the pilot began to descend.

The aircraft, which appeared to be a Black Hawk, weighed more than 11,000 pounds empty. It touched down with its rotors still turning, and the Helistop held. The pilot asked whether anyone needed evacuation. Primeaux proposed a sick newborn; after checking with his commander, the pilot agreed to take one. Primeaux hurried down the garage stairs to alert the incident command team, then went to the neonatal intensive care unit, where staff were preparing critically ill babies for transport.

The first baby’s journey revealed the distance between a landing surface and a functioning evacuation system. With the garage elevators unavailable, the trip from the maternity area to the roof was long and circuitous. When the baby finally reached the platform, the pilot judged the delay unacceptable. He had thousands of people to help across the city and would not return, leaving hospital staff to find a better way of getting patients to aircraft. The successful landing had demonstrated that the roof could hold a helicopter, not that the hospital could deliver a patient to it in time.

Moving newborns to the roof

The later effort to evacuate the sickest babies demanded strenuous, improvised labor. Staff placed two very ill infants in a transport isolette, a wheeled incubator equipped with oxygen tanks, warming pads, and battery-powered pumps for intravenous fluids. Because the machine was too tall to fit in the back of a pickup truck, the team pushed it up the parking garage’s descending ramp, circling toward the ninth story, and then carried it up three flights of fire-escape stairs. Five men in sweat-soaked shirts heaved the incubator upward while a nurse climbed beside them. When one baby’s oxygen equipment failed, she repeatedly compressed a small self-inflating bag through an opening in the incubator, manually supplying oxygen as the group continued toward the Helistop.

At the top, the expected Coast Guard helicopters were not there. Pilots unfamiliar with the city were having trouble locating Memorial Medical Center, and the landing area had not been certified for use in years. Its surviving markings still named the former Southern Baptist Hospital, potentially confusing pilots searching for the current hospital. Staff later sent approach maps and geographic coordinates to a Coast Guard representative. While the babies waited in a covered tunnel, their incubators drew power from an outlet supplied by a hospital generator. Juan Jorge Gershanik, the neonatologist, worried that the babies were overheating and that one might need urgent surgery; he also feared the consequences if the remaining power failed.

When helicopters did arrive, the platform remained a place of negotiation as well as transport. Pilots were not all willing to take sick newborns, whose care required specialized support. On one flight carrying two critically ill babies, a refueling stop stretched beyond its planned five minutes while other aircraft were served first. Gershanik checked that a baby was still alive and saw that the oxygen tank was nearly empty. The Army helicopters ahead of them were rescuing people from rooftops who would otherwise die. He changed oxygen tanks during the delay and accepted that the competing emergencies extended far beyond his patients.

An improvised flight line

The Helistop’s crowded, disorderly activity also impeded evacuation. Nurses waved down passing aircraft, and hospital staff and other onlookers gathered to watch. A newly arrived Acadian coordinator, who was moving among hospitals with small medical helicopters, found Memorial less organized than other sites. He set down a cooler of sandwiches for his flight crews; people on the tarmac quickly emptied it. On the platform, doctors had begun arguing with a Coast Guard pilot about how many patients his helicopter could carry, and he flew away to rescue people elsewhere.

A nurse who was also an Air Force captain recognized that an emergency landing area needed flight-line control. She told Richard Deichmann, the medical-services chairman overseeing the Helistop, that the Air Force had trained her to run a flight line. He put her in charge. She moved doctors and patients into the wind-protection tunnel and cleared people from the hospital rooftops so pilots could land. The contrast was stark: an improvised system had to establish basic order around a facility whose original design had promised immediate access. Even as the last critically ill babies were loaded, a pilot’s flight plan named a hospital west of Baton Rouge rather than the hospital that had agreed to receive Memorial’s newborns.

The Helistop’s role was therefore neither simply a success nor simply a failure. A helicopter landed on a platform whose structural safety had been in doubt, and aircraft ultimately offered a route out for patients whom flooded streets and failed elevators could not move. But the climb through the garage, the missing aircraft, the obsolete identifying marks, and the confusion on the roof repeatedly turned that route into a bottleneck. The scene makes the distinction between infrastructure and rescue tangible: a landing place could survive the storm and still be only one fragile link in getting a patient to safety.