New Orleans Mandatory Evacuation Order (2005)

The New Orleans Mandatory Evacuation Order (2005) was Mayor Ray Nagin’s immediate, mandatory directive for New Orleans residents to leave as Hurricane Katrina approached. Issued after a delay over logistical and legal questions, it made evacuation the city’s official response while exposing a central gap in that response: many people could not leave independently, and hospitals were exempted from closing even as their own safety was uncertain.

Issuance and Authority

At around ten o’clock on Sunday morning, August 28, Ray Nagin signed the order. He later acknowledged that it had been delayed while his staff worked through practical and legal questions, including whether he had authority to mandate an evacuation. To his knowledge, no previous New Orleans mayor had done so. State law, however, allowed the governor and parish presidents—and, by extension, the mayor—to issue such an order.

Nagin read the order aloud at a press conference with Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco. He warned that the storm surge could topple the levee system; Blanco said flooding might reach fifteen to twenty feet. The order’s forceful instruction to leave was thus delivered alongside a stark account of the danger, but the warning did not itself provide a way out for everyone who heard it.

Who Could Leave

Many residents had no car or other means of leaving the city, and officials knew that plans to transport them had significant gaps, including too few drivers. Residents able to evacuate independently were already caught in traffic on the interstate. The New Orleans Superdome was designated a shelter of last resort, with shuttle buses intended for people who could not get out on their own. Nagin specifically urged people with medical conditions, including those on dialysis, to move there promptly, but did not explain what assistance they could expect at the shelter.

The order also made exemptions. Essential hotel workers could remain to serve tourists whose flights had been canceled and who could not flee independently. Essential sheriff’s office workers were exempted so they could continue watching prisoners at the parish jail; those prisoners, too, were not being moved. The directive therefore required a broad civilian departure while leaving some people in place because the institutions responsible for them still had to operate.

Hospitals and the Limits of the Order

When a reporter asked whether people should stay in hospitals, Nagin said he had exempted hospitals and their workers. His stated concern was that people might be injured during the hurricane and face a dangerous situation if hospitals closed and turned them away. The exemption preserved hospital operations as a public safeguard, but it also left patients and staff inside facilities exposed to the approaching storm.

That tension was especially consequential because New Orleans had thousands of hospital patients and no resolved plan for moving them to safety through floodwaters. Memorial Medical Center was among the hospitals whose generators and electrical switching gear were not located above ground-floor level. The citywide evacuation order did not, by itself, solve the distinct problem of evacuating people who depended on hospitals for care.

Consequences Inside Memorial

As floodwaters threatened Memorial, nurse manager Karen Wynn recalled that the atmosphere in the hospital’s command room shifted from an ordinary emergency to a military operation, with staff focused on acting before the power failed. Nearly two hundred patients needed to be brought to safety. The order’s hospital exemption had allowed the facility to remain open, but the ensuing crisis required hospital staff to make urgent decisions about patient movement under conditions the wider evacuation effort had not made manageable.

The contrast continued on the helipad. A nurse with Air Force flight-line experience took charge after a dispute with a Coast Guard pilot over helicopter capacity had contributed to a helicopter flying off to rescue people elsewhere. Later, neonatal nurses resisted a plan to send babies to a hospital other than the one that had agreed to receive them; they insisted that the pilot obtain approval for the intended destination before they would release the infants. These episodes show the evacuation problem continuing beyond the mayor’s order: issuing a command to leave was not the same as coordinating safe transport for patients with specialized needs.