New Orleans Mandatory Evacuation Order

On August 28, 2005, Mayor Ray Nagin ordered the immediate evacuation of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina bore down on the city. The directive was a decisive public command, but not a complete means of escape: many residents had no way to leave, transportation plans had serious gaps, and hospitals were exempted from closing even as officials confronted the danger flooding posed to their power systems. The order’s history is therefore both a moment of urgent action and a record of how unevenly that action could reach the people who needed it.

Forecast and Decision

By Sunday morning, television screens throughout Memorial Medical Center carried images of Katrina filling the Gulf of Mexico. The storm had reached Category Five, the highest level on the Saffir-Simpson scale, and even experienced observers were shocked by the forecasts. The National Weather Service warned that much of the area might be uninhabitable for weeks or longer and described a storm of unprecedented strength expected to strike within twelve to twenty-four hours. Its outlook included catastrophic damage to roofs and walls, power outages lasting weeks, and water shortages that would make human suffering severe. Local officials urged people to leave. One nearby parish leader warned residents who stayed that they might need tools to break through their roofs rather than become trapped in their attics, recalling deaths during Hurricane Betsy. He also advised filling upstairs bathtubs with water for drinking, bathing, and flushing toilets after the storm. Against that prospect, Nagin’s instruction was not to improvise in place but to leave the city. Nagin signed the mandatory, immediate order at about ten in the morning. He later acknowledged that its issuance had been delayed by precious hours while his staff worked through logistical and legal questions, including whether he had authority to require evacuation. To his knowledge, no previous New Orleans mayor had done so. State law, however, permitted the governor and parish presidents to order evacuation and, by extension, allowed Nagin to act as well. The order was thus an exceptional step for the city, taken after uncertainty about authority had consumed time the approaching storm made scarce.

The Public Announcement

Nagin read the order aloud at a press conference with Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco. Standing before the New Orleans city seal, he warned, “The storm surge most likely will topple our levee system,” and added, “We are facing a storm that most of us have feared.” Blanco said flooding could reach fifteen to twenty feet. The announcement put the danger plainly before the public and converted the evacuation from a recommendation into a citywide command. Yet a command to leave could not itself provide a car, a driver, or a route out. Residents who could evacuate on their own were already caught in traffic on the interstate. Officials knew that the city’s transport arrangements had significant holes, including too few drivers. For people without cars or another independent means of escape, the order’s urgency therefore arrived alongside a practical question that the announcement could not resolve: where, and by what means, could they go?

Unequal Routes to Safety

The New Orleans Superdome was designated a shelter of last resort. People unable to get out of the city could reach it by shuttle bus, a limited alternative rather than a general evacuation system. Nagin singled out people with medical conditions, including those on dialysis, and urged them to move there promptly. He did not specify what kind of medical assistance they could expect at the shelter. The appeal acknowledged that some evacuees would need more than a destination, while leaving the nature of that support unstated. The order also made exceptions for essential hotel workers, who were needed to serve tourists stranded after their flights were canceled, and for essential sheriff’s office employees required to watch prisoners at the parish jail. Those groups, like hospital staff, were not being moved out. The evacuation was consequently broad in its command but selective in its operation: some people were told to depart, while others remained because their work or the people in their care could not simply be left behind.

Hospitals and the Limits of the Order

At the press conference, a questioner asked whether people should stay in hospitals. Nagin replied that hospitals and their workers were exempt. People might be injured during the hurricane, he said, and if hospitals closed and turned them away, that would create “a very dangerous situation.” The exemption preserved hospitals as places where injured people could seek care, but it also left patients and staff inside buildings exposed to the storm. That exposure was not merely hypothetical. During a contemporaneous emergency-planning call, a Federal Emergency Management Agency representative asked which hospitals in flood-prone areas had placed both generators and electrical switching gear above ground-floor level. In and around New Orleans, only two of roughly eighteen hospitals had done so; Memorial Medical Center was not among them. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention response leader later warned colleagues that many hospital generators were expected to lose power if the water reached the anticipated height. These concerns do not establish what Nagin knew when he announced the exemption, but they show the peril embedded in treating hospital doors remaining open as a sufficient answer to the storm. The city’s preparations had already contemplated the scale of the problem. A Hurricane Pam exercise sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency had taken place in New Orleans earlier that week, and its scenario assumed that more than two thousand hospital patients would be in the city during a catastrophic hurricane. Around 2,500 patients remained as Katrina approached. Despite planning sessions extending over more than a year, officials had not determined how such a large patient population could be moved to safety through floodwaters; federal health officials had not participated in the latest sessions. The evacuation order made departure mandatory, but the uncompleted planning left especially vulnerable residents without a settled route to safety. Its central contradiction was stark: the city had to empty quickly, while the people least able to leave on their own—and the institutions responsible for their care—could not be moved by declaration alone.