The New Orleans Convention Center emerges in the account as an overcrowded destination in the fragmented evacuation of New Orleans, where families hoped to reunite and displaced people searched for safety. Its significance lies in the gap between reaching a place where others might be found and knowing whether they were alive, safe, or still missing.

A destination amid the evacuation

On Thursday afternoon, nurse Marirose Bernard left Memorial Medical Center by boat, hoping to find family members who had departed the previous day and were believed to be stuck at the New Orleans Convention Center. Instead, she spent the night on the I-10 cloverleaf with other staff members, who said their lives were threatened. Her account places the center within a wider landscape of disrupted travel: even a nurse leaving the hospital by boat could not simply reach the relatives she was seeking.

Overcrowding and uncertainty

Karen Lagasse also made it out of Memorial Medical Center by boat and ended up at the overcrowded New Orleans Convention Center. Afraid for her life, she slept outside on the street. Someone there told her that her mother, Merle Lagasse, had died at the hospital, but Karen refused to believe it. The center offered no reliable resolution to the separation; the news she received there intensified her uncertainty instead.

The search that followed

Karen recruited friends to call emergency rooms across Louisiana and Texas, searching for ten frantic days. Only then did a Tenet official tell her that her mother was on a list of people believed to have died during the evacuation. Months later, Karen returned to the hospital garage to search debris for her mother’s personal effects. The account thus connects the Convention Center to a longer aftermath of displacement: arrival there did not reunite Karen with her mother or tell her with certainty what had happened.

Place in the wider crisis

The hospital evacuations surrounding these journeys unfolded under severe constraints. At public Charity Hospital, the transfer of patients was not completed until Friday afternoon, September 2, a day after Memorial Medical Center’s evacuation had been completed; despite worse conditions and roughly twice as many patients across its two campuses, fewer than ten patients died there. Against this fractured regional response, the Convention Center appears not as a guaranteed endpoint but as one crowded place where evacuees and separated families converged while the search for loved ones continued.