United States National Guard

The National Guard appears throughout the New Orleans disaster as a practical but intermittent presence: soldiers helped move animals and patients at Memorial Medical Center, supplied high-water transport, and later assisted in evacuations elsewhere. Its contribution was consequential, but it was not a substitute for a coordinated citywide rescue system. At Memorial, the Guard’s presence could make a transfer possible; its departure could leave hospital staff facing the next emergency without outside protection or guidance.

Role in the Disaster

The evidence presents National Guard soldiers as part of the response around flooded hospitals and neighborhoods, rather than as a single, continuously available rescue force. A unit had spent the hurricane at Memorial, and soldiers worked alongside hospital volunteers. Elsewhere, Guardsmen helped people board boats, moved a patient out of Touro Infirmary, and later served in a battalion assigned to aid and secure the neighborhood around Memorial. These episodes show several kinds of service—manual assistance, transport, evacuation, and security—but also the limits of what could be reliably expected from them.

That irregularity unfolded amid failures larger than any one group could repair. People without cars depended on public transport plans that lacked enough drivers, while ambulances were immobilized in traffic or redirected to the Superdome. Flooding, unreliable communication, and uncoordinated rescue efforts compounded the problem. The Guard was one element in this fragmented response: sometimes physically present at a critical point, but not able to ensure that transport, protection, or care would continue everywhere it was needed.

Assistance at Memorial Medical Center

At Memorial, volunteers and National Guard soldiers formed a chain to carry kennels upstairs as floodwaters raised concern for emergency-room patients and animals kept in the medical records department. The kennels were placed in unused surgical suites on the eighth floor, behind the intensive-care unit. The episode captures an immediate, improvised task shared by hospital workers and soldiers before the threatened first-floor flooding had reached the patients who remained in the emergency room.

The Guard also became central to Memorial’s patient evacuation. Hospital leaders sought additional transport as it became clear that the crisis exceeded the capacity of the staff and the few ambulances at the emergency-room ramp. A plan arranged with state and military contacts called for thirty-five medical and surgical patients to travel in high-water troop-hauler trucks to a Tenet hospital in Texas. By midafternoon, water had climbed partway up the sloping ramp, where a camouflage-green truck waited. Staff, including surgeon Anna Pou, guided patients from the emergency department: some used wheelchairs, while others walked with assistance or walkers. At about four o’clock, the truck drove west through the water and past fallen crepe myrtle trees. A hospital in Nacogdoches, Texas, had agreed to receive those patients; another twenty-seven were expected to go when a second truck arrived. The evidence records the plan for that further transfer, not its completion.

Military and civilian coordination also shaped the broader evacuation effort. Memorial’s leaders sought ambulances and helicopters, while hospital communications staff reported that the helipad could receive aircraft. A Baton Rouge hospital agreed to take Memorial’s babies, sixteen of whom were critically ill, and Coast Guard helicopters were expected to bring them and several adult intensive-care patients out. The National Guard’s planned truck movement was a separate part of the response, aimed at medical and surgical patients. The distinction matters: even as multiple channels of assistance began to form, no single arrangement met every transport need.

Departures, Security, and Uncertainty

The Guard’s presence did not last continuously. When people arrived at Memorial in boats seeking food and help, the National Guard had left, and New Orleans police officers were preparing to leave as well. Hospital staff received no direction from the departing officers about where to send the people outside. The arriving crowd, the visible helicopter evacuations, and concern about the hospital’s security made the building’s role as a refuge increasingly difficult to manage. The episode shows how quickly a hospital could become a destination for people in need even while its own evacuation remained unresolved.

At another point in the emergency, National Guardsmen and local police left for the night. Memorial’s chief executive distributed firearms brought by employees from St. Bernard Parish to security and maintenance workers, who blocked the entrances. On the night of September 1, staff and relatives—including incident commander Susan Mulderick and her elderly mother—spent the night on the open helipad after rescue helicopters stopped coming. Armed hospital employees guarded the staircases because they feared looters; when people, including children, appeared at a window, staff threatened to shoot if they came closer. These were the hospital employees’ actions, not actions attributed to the Guard. The distinction underscores how fear and the absence of reliable protection could turn uncertain reports of danger into decisions made inside the hospital.

Information about the surrounding threat was itself unstable. A radio repeated an announcement by the president of neighboring Jefferson Parish that martial law had been declared, although no such declaration had in fact been made in the disaster zone. Broadcast accounts of violence and disorder also circulated among LifeCare staff. The available evidence does not establish that the Guard issued or verified these reports; instead, it shows that rumors and incomplete information formed part of the environment in which hospital workers judged whether to remain, evacuate, or defend the building.

Evacuation Elsewhere and the Aftermath

At Touro Infirmary, a nurse later recounted that National Guard members arrived near the end of the evacuation and ordered the remaining staff to leave for their safety. The nurse said the soldiers reassured staff that they would stay behind to protect roughly two dozen patients. Guardsmen subsequently wheeled Odun Arechaga out of Touro and summoned medical personnel from a smaller hospital across the street. He was found on the third floor on September 2, in critical condition, and rescuers recognized that he urgently needed medical attention. This account places the Guard in a difficult role: its members were both directing staff to withdraw and taking patients out of the building. It does not establish that every patient left behind received the same assistance.

The Guard also appeared after the immediate evacuation. For days, the deceased at Memorial remained there while people came through the hospital, including a battalion of National Guardsmen from San Diego assigned to aid and secure the neighborhood. Their presence among the many visitors belongs to the aftermath, distinct from the earlier attempts to evacuate living patients. At Memorial, those earlier efforts had moved some patients by military truck, while other transfers depended on helicopters, ambulances, or boats. The Guard’s recurring presence thus marks both the possibilities and the gaps of emergency response: soldiers could help carry, transport, protect, and recover, but their intermittent availability could not resolve the failures of planning, communications, and evacuation that left hospitals and their surrounding communities exposed.