Michael Richard

Michael Richard, a Coast Guard auxiliary volunteer, helped coordinate rescue efforts for critically ill patients at Memorial Medical Center during the Katrina crisis. Working alongside Shelley Decker in Alexandria, Louisiana, he spent hours trying to secure hospital placements and keep helicopter evacuations moving. His sharpest intervention came when a hospital leader proposed stopping the rescue of patients who belonged to another company: Richard insisted that the most critical patients should go first, not be abandoned as inevitable losses.

Position in the Rescue Effort

Richard worked beside Shelley Decker at the Coast Guard emergency command center in Alexandria, Louisiana, as officials tried to reach patients at Memorial Medical Center. Decker had been pressing for helicopters to evacuate LifeCare Hospitals’ ventilator-dependent patients. At least three helicopters had already reached Memorial and been waved away, so the difficulty was not simply getting aircraft to the hospital; crews also needed staff on the helipad to make the rescue possible.

Richard spoke by cell phone with a nurse leader on the helipad. She appeared to be panicking and waving her arms, apparently believing she was signaling the pilots when she was turning them away. Richard warned her, “When those helicopters come, stand clear!” The moment captures the confusion surrounding the operation: aircraft were available, but the people trying to coordinate them were separated by failing communications, exhaustion, and mistaken signals.

The stakes were immediate. Helicopter crews could fly only eight hours in any twenty-four-hour period, while thousands of people across the city needed rescue. Decker and her colleagues were coordinating through several cell phones, the air stations, and a radio patch to a C-130 overhead. Richard’s work was part of this strained chain of communication, in which a missed landing could mean a critically ill patient remained trapped without reliable life support.

Resistance to Stopping the Airlift

Richard spent hours trying to find hospitals willing to receive patients and persuading hospital leaders to let the rescues proceed as Memorial’s backup generators failed. One leader told him that the hospital had to evacuate its own patients first, rather than take critically ill patients belonging to another company who were expected to die anyway. Richard was shocked by the proposal and wondered whether money lay behind it. He put the phone down and pretended to consult a superior, though he later acknowledged that he did not feel he needed anyone’s permission to object.

When he picked up the phone, Richard said, “Absolutely not,” and insisted, “You’re going to take the most critical out first.” The hospital leader replied that the decision was hers. Richard answered that it was not, while recognizing that the choice might not formally belong to him either. His protest did not rest on institutional authority; he acted because he believed the proposed decision was wrong and could not accept letting the most vulnerable patients be passed over.

The disagreement came as Memorial’s nurses were moving patients up and down dark stairwells by hand and manually ventilating them. They told Decker they were exhausted and that the remaining ventilator patients were DNR, although that description did not apply to all of them. Staff said the patients would continue to receive hand ventilation, and that operations could resume at nine in the morning. By the time the decision to stop reached Decker, three sorties had evacuated three ventilator patients and one patient using a special oxygen device. Richard had already been told that a ventilator patient died while waiting.

Conviction and Ethical Significance

Richard’s objection was personal as well as practical. He believed the hospital leader could not make such a choice and live with it afterward; he thought the decision would scar her conscience. Raised Christian, he understood care for those most in need as a duty. That conviction made him willing to challenge the leader directly, even though he was an auxiliary volunteer and the decision concerned another institution’s patients.

The larger evacuation was also shaped by Memorial’s decision to place patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders last. A DNR order meant that a patient whose breathing or heartbeat stopped should not be revived; it was not, by itself, an instruction to withhold rescue. A patient’s daughter later said she had not understood her mother’s DNR order to mean that she should be left behind. Richard is not shown making that specific argument, but his insistence that the sickest patients be taken first opposed the same broader drift toward treating patients’ classifications or affiliations as reasons to defer their rescue.

The account does not establish that Richard’s challenge reversed the decision to suspend the airlift. Its significance lies instead in the clarity of his refusal: as institutional boundaries and exhaustion threatened to turn a rescue into a ranking of whose patients mattered, he argued that urgency—not corporate ownership—should determine who was carried out first.