Shelley Decker

Shelley Decker was a Coast Guard officer and former Army pilot who worked from an emergency command center in Alexandria during Hurricane Katrina. At Memorial Medical Center, LifeCare patients dependent on ventilators needed evacuation by helicopter, but getting aircraft to the hospital was only one part of the rescue: staff also had to identify the patients, move them through the building, and carry them to the helipad. Decker’s work placed her at the point where those separate tasks either met or failed to connect.

Identity and Role

Decker had recently joined the Coast Guard after serving as an Army pilot. During the emergency, she worked to secure helicopter access for LifeCare’s ventilator patients and to relay information between the command center, the air station, the aircraft, and staff at Memorial. She was not inside the hospital: her view of its conditions came through calls and updates from people on the roof and inside the building. That distance mattered. The command center had functioning electricity, water, and phone lines, while Memorial’s staff were operating in darkness and carrying patients by hand.

The rescue effort depended on a chain of communication rather than a single decision or flight. Decker and two colleagues maintained contact with three cell phones at Memorial, communicated with air stations, and used an HF radio patch to reach a C-130 flying over New Orleans, which could task helicopter pilots. Decker repeatedly tried to reach nurse leader Susan Mulderick on a cell phone so she could provide a running account of aircraft arrivals. Each link was necessary, but the system could still break down if crews and hospital staff misunderstood one another or if the patients could not be brought to the landing area.

Repeated Attempts to Reach Memorial

Decker learned that at least three helicopters had already gone to Memorial and been waved away. She urged a contact at the air station to send an aircraft back, explaining that the crews needed to land. At the hospital, Coast Guard auxiliary volunteer Michael Richard spoke by cell phone with a nurse leader on the helipad. The nurse appeared to be waving her arms, believing she was signaling the pilots when she was actually turning them off. Richard told her to stand clear when the helicopters arrived. The scene illustrates how an attempted signal could become the opposite of what rescuers needed, with no shared view of what was happening on the roof.

The pilots had severe time constraints: each rescue crew could fly for only eight hours in a twenty-four-hour period, while thousands of people across the city needed help. Decker knew that every lost minute mattered to the critically ill patients at Memorial. She had been told that a ventilator patient had already died while waiting, and struggled to understand why aircraft kept missing people who were meant to be rescued. Her question was not simply whether helicopters could reach the hospital; it was how the rescue chain could be made to deliver them to the patients.

One Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter had earlier flown from Memorial to Tulane Hospital with an Acadian Ambulance coordinator. A C-130 later diverted it back to Memorial to rescue the critically ill LifeCare patients. In the intervening hours, the crew had lifted people from flooded homes and taken them to a highway interchange west of New Orleans. A rescue swimmer carried an elderly woman who could not walk across a field to emergency workers. The crew also saw thousands of people gathered near the highway, surrounded by refuse, with no buses in sight. The helicopter’s return to Memorial therefore took place amid a wider rescue emergency, not an isolated hospital operation.

When the Jayhawk returned at night, its crew used a slight tailwind to maneuver onto the helipad. They were again told that no critical patients were there to be rescued, while non-patients and staff were anxious to leave and becoming difficult to manage. The crew asked by radio what to do next. Word then came back from contacts inside the hospital that patients were still waiting. Decker’s efforts to coordinate the aircraft could not, by themselves, resolve the conflicting reports or move the patients through the building.

The Airlift Is Suspended

Before six in the morning, Mulderick’s decision to stop the airlift reached Decker at the command center. Three sorties had taken place, but only three LifeCare ventilator patients and one patient using a special oxygen device had been rescued. Memorial nurses explained that it was dark and that they were moving patients up and down stairs by hand, with a nurse continuously ventilating each patient using a bag. They said they were exhausted and that operations might resume at nine in the morning.

Decker had assumed that emergency lighting was available. From her well-lit room, with running water, electricity, and working phone lines, she found it difficult to picture the conditions the nurses described. She understood their explanation, but found the decision to pause hard to accept: rescue aircraft could be sent to Memorial, yet staff could not get the remaining patients to the helipad. Her position brought into focus the gap between available rescue capacity and the hospital’s ability to use it.

The nurses also told Decker that the remaining ventilator patients were DNR, although this was not true of all of them. They assured her that the patients would continue to receive manual ventilation. The account records both the practical reason for suspending the movement—darkness, stairs, and exhaustion—and the consequential generalization that patients were DNR. Decker was receiving this information remotely and had to weigh the nurses’ report against the fact that patients still awaited evacuation.

Michael Richard responded more forcefully. After spending hours finding hospitals willing to take patients and trying to persuade Memorial leaders to continue the rescues, he objected when he learned of the pause. He believed the most critical patients should be evacuated first and challenged Mulderick’s authority to end the operation. Decker and Richard were on the same side of the communication effort, but the episode distinguishes their reactions: Decker understood the staff’s stated limits while struggling to accept the result; Richard directly confronted the decision and insisted that rescue continue.

Significance in the Account

Decker’s role makes visible a rescue operation in which urgency and capability did not guarantee access to those in greatest need. Helicopters could be directed back, pilots could reach the helipad, and command-center staff could maintain a complicated network of phones and radio links; still, patients had to be carried through a dark hospital by exhausted workers. The repeated misdirection of aircraft and the eventual suspension of the airlift show how communication failures and conditions inside the building could turn available rescue resources into an incomplete evacuation.

A Louisiana emergency medical services phone log on the morning of September 1 listed sixty patients at Memorial who needed transfer by stretcher, while Decker’s notes recorded an immediate evacuation tasking for the hospital. The figures and tasking give scale to the problem beyond the small number of patients moved during the overnight sorties. Decker’s account does not present the rescue as a simple contest between willing pilots and unwilling staff: it follows the strained connections among aircraft, hospital workers, command centers, and patients, and shows the human consequences when those connections could not hold.