St. Bernard Parish emerges as both a place with a long memory of flooding and a setting where the limits of disaster evacuation became concrete. In Chalmette, the single-story LifeCare hospital stood in the path of feared rising water; moving its very ill patients meant weighing the dangers of transport against the possibility that floodwaters might reach the roof.

A Community Shaped by Floods

The parish had been slowly rebuilt after it was surrendered to spare New Orleans from the 1927 floods. Later disasters reinforced residents’ unease. After Hurricane Betsy in 1965, levee breaks, devastating flooding, and a failure of the pumping system left many with little faith that officials or levees would protect them. That history made the prospect of another storm more than a matter of forecasts: it informed how residents understood the danger and the reliability of the systems meant to keep them safe.

LifeCare in Chalmette

LifeCare occupied a single-story building on Virtue Street in Chalmette. Gina Isbell, its nursing director, faced the question of whether to move patients somewhere safer before the forecast threat became reality. A premature transfer could endanger people too sick to travel; waiting could leave them exposed if water rose over the rooftop. The building’s location and design turned that uncertainty into an immediate decision about patient safety.

Isbell was committed to caring for patients whose multiple medical problems could deter other health professionals. The transfer to the Baptist campus took until nightfall. Nineteen patients made the journey; a twentieth died en route. Ambulances were scarce, so patients traveled in groups of as many as four, accompanied by medicines prepared by their pharmacist. Emmett Everett, a paraplegic patient weighing 380 pounds, was moved and resettled on his own Big Boy bed. These details show how evacuation depended not only on reaching a safer destination but also on arranging transport around patients’ individual care needs.

The Wider Evacuation Crisis

St. Bernard’s hospital transfer unfolded amid a regional evacuation that offered no simple route to safety. Many residents had no cars or other means of leaving, and officials knew that plans to transport them were short of drivers. People who could evacuate independently were already caught in traffic on the interstate. The New Orleans Superdome was designated a shelter of last resort, and Mayor Ray Nagin urged people with medical conditions to go there, without specifying what assistance they could expect.

The ambulance shortage extended across the region. Dispatchers at Acadian, the largest ambulance company, were overwhelmed by calls from threatened hospitals, nursing homes, and homes. Many of the roughly two dozen ambulances made available were stuck on the congested interstate; some began taking patients to the New Orleans Superdome rather than attempting to carry them out of town. In this broader emergency, St. Bernard’s isolation was not only geographic: the routes, vehicles, and public arrangements needed to move vulnerable people were themselves constrained.

Significance

The parish’s history links the immediate threat at LifeCare to a recurring problem: the people most dependent on protection could not necessarily move quickly or safely when danger approached. In Chalmette, that problem took the form of a rooftop threatened by forecast floodwaters, a limited supply of ambulances, and patients whose medical needs shaped every stage of transport. The account makes St. Bernard Parish a crucial local setting for understanding how past disasters, fragile infrastructure, and uneven access to evacuation compounded risk.