Sandra Cordray

Sandra Cordray was Memorial Medical Center’s community relations manager and designated communications leader for Hurricane Katrina. As the hospital faced rising floodwater, dwindling supplies, failing power, and an urgent need to evacuate, she became its principal communications link with Tenet Healthcare’s headquarters in Dallas. Her emails record both the effort to find help and the limits of a response that depended on distant corporate coordination while patients and staff remained at the hospital.

Role and Preparation

Cordray’s position put her at the intersection of Memorial’s command structure and its parent company. Memorial CEO René Goux asked her to relay concerns to Tenet executives: patient care could become difficult after the storm, floodwater was rising, and power loss might continue. The immediate message was not yet that evacuation was certain, but that the hospital needed to consider it as a possibility. The book identifies Cordray as the designated communications leader, a role that became increasingly consequential as ordinary phone connections grew difficult and email remained usable.

As conditions worsened, Memorial’s leaders brought additional voices into its command meetings. After a brief homily, chaplain John Marse noticed that water outside had risen to halfway up a fire hydrant. Cordray asked him to attend future meetings, seeking help from every available source. At the same time, she took charge of communications with Tenet, sending information about rising basement water, reports of looting, the presence of National Guard personnel, and the evacuation of other hospitals. She also forwarded contact information for an Air National Guard major, hoping Tenet headquarters could reach him.

Escalating Appeals to Tenet

The hospital’s requests quickly became more concrete. With chief operating officer Sean Fowler beside her, Cordray sought answers about medicines, blood products, water, food, and the ground and air resources Tenet was arranging. The immediate issue was no longer simply planning for a possible evacuation: Memorial needed to get patients out. Cordray’s successive messages grew more urgent, asking whether anyone could take patients and whether help was available.

Tenet regional business development director Michael Arvin told Cordray that the company was trying to secure medicines and blood but did not know how to deliver them. He pointed to the National Guard and to Tenet’s Lindy Boggs Medical Center, which was also awaiting troops. The response left Memorial without a clear corporate solution. Cordray challenged whether this meant the hospital had been left to manage alone. Later, Memorial’s director of case management sent a separate appeal to colleagues at other Tenet hospitals, reporting that Memorial expected as much as fifteen feet of water and needed places for its 187 patients. That appeal underscores the scale of the problem Cordray was trying to communicate: the need was not for a few supplies, but for a destination and transport plan for a hospital’s patient census.

Arranging Air and Ground Evacuation

Cordray also conveyed information about Memorial’s helipad to Arvin, reporting that it was operational and could receive aircraft. The calls and emails began to produce limited arrangements. A hospital in Baton Rouge agreed to accept Memorial’s babies, sixteen of them critically ill, and Coast Guard helicopters were expected to transport them and several adult intensive-care patients. A separate plan called for National Guard high-water trucks to move thirty-five medical and surgical patients to a Tenet hospital in Texas. These arrangements offered routes for particular groups, but did not resolve the fate of the more than one hundred patients still needing evacuation, much less the hundreds of other people in the hospital.

The wider shortage of rescue capacity complicated those plans. State officials were seeking additional medical-evacuation helicopters, while Tenet executives continued to rely on government resources despite some expressions of willingness from hospitals elsewhere to help. As aircraft arrived, it also became clear that Memorial could not control every destination: Cordray informed Arvin that patients might be taken to any hospital willing to receive them. A quick trip to a staging area could return a helicopter to service faster than a longer flight to an out-of-state hospital, but the receiving and onward-transport system for those staging points remained unsettled. Cordray’s correspondence therefore tracks not just requests for aircraft but a fragmented chain in which landing, destination, and further transport were separate problems.

LifeCare and the Unresolved Evacuation

The difficulty of coordinating evacuation also affected the patients of LifeCare Hospitals, which operated a unit inside Memorial. As Coast Guard helicopters arrived and Memorial patients were being moved, LifeCare patients had not yet been included in that transport. The proposed arrangement was to seek Tenet corporate approval for LifeCare patients to use federal rescue assets, even though the reason that approval was required was unclear. Cordray contacted Arvin about working directly with LifeCare and suggested that Memorial could take LifeCare’s fifty-two patients to a staging area outside the city, where LifeCare could meet them with ambulances and transport them to Baton Rouge.

Cordray later sent Arvin the contact information for LifeCare manager Robbye Dubois and noted that no more National Guard trucks would be available that day because the water had risen too high. Dubois was still awaiting approval to dispatch ambulances; after speaking with Arvin, she expected that patients might not move until morning. LifeCare planned to send its most critical patients first, with staff to care for them, and expected movement to begin between three and eight in the morning. Cordray’s messages show how the hospital’s evacuation depended on multiple organizations aligning their transport and permissions, even as conditions changed faster than those arrangements could be confirmed.

The Nighttime Offer and the Record Afterward

Before eleven that night, the United States Coast Guard offered to continue sending helicopters and boats to Memorial. Cordray reported that as many as five helicopters might be deployed in a renewed effort to evacuate patients. Anesthesiologist Paul Primeaux supported continuing the operation and went to alert the evacuation team. The offer was declined before he reached the helipad. The book describes the danger of nighttime operations there, including a near fall and lighting that could interfere with pilots’ night-vision equipment; the decision to stop therefore unfolded amid real operational risks and deep disagreement about whether rescue should continue.

An email from Arvin later that night reassured Cordray that a person responsible for air-evacuation coordination would have more helicopters available at first light. The account distinguishes that message from a promise: the emergency medical services coordinator had recorded it as a request for help, not an assurance that Memorial would receive the aircraft. This distinction reflects the uncertainty Cordray was navigating, where communication could convey hope without securing resources.

Later evidence also qualifies how the early LifeCare coordination unfolded. In a deposition, Susan Mulderick recalled Cordray asking LifeCare whether it needed help; LifeCare initially said it was working through its own corporate or management structure. Acadian Ambulance’s Keith Brisbois later recalled offering assistance soon after the evacuation decision and being surprised that LifeCare was awaiting word from its corporate office about transportation. At the same time, later texts and emails show LifeCare personnel requesting evacuation assistance from Memorial, Tenet, and Acadian. These accounts portray a changing sequence of requests and responses rather than a single settled plan. Cordray’s significance in the narrative lies in her position inside that sequence: she carried urgent information between the hospital and corporate headquarters, pressed for resources, and helped connect organizations whose plans did not automatically meet the needs unfolding at Memorial.