Curtis Dosch

Curtis Dosch was Memorial Medical Center’s chief financial officer during Hurricane Katrina and later became its interim chief executive ahead of the hospital’s partial reopening. His account of the disaster places him in two sharply different settings: a powered cancer center, where he found television, a recliner, a fan, and hot food, and the darkened hospital, where patients remained in dangerous conditions. He did bring some comforts back to the hospital, but his interviews also exposed how much senior staff knew, how little they acknowledged, and how difficult it was afterward to establish what had happened.

Role at Memorial

Dosch was Memorial’s CFO; Sean Fowler was its chief operating officer, and L. René Goux its CEO. In the months after the storm, Dosch and Fowler were interviewed by investigators Virginia Rider and Butch Schafer. Their accounts startled the investigators with a detail about the cancer institute connected to Memorial by sky bridges: it had electricity and a working generator throughout the disaster. Executives went there to make phone calls and coffee. The institute’s functioning power made the separation between the executives’ refuge and the hospital’s patients especially stark.

Dosch had recently been promoted to interim CEO as Memorial prepared to reopen in part. The book also recalls that John Thiele had rested with him in the cancer center during the disaster; Thiele later likened Dosch’s tall, reedy appearance to Jed Clampett. That recollection attaches Dosch to the refuge not just as an executive who found it, but as someone who shared the space with a critically ill physician while the hospital faced the crisis.

The Powered Cancer Center

Dosch described discovering that the cancer center had power and returning to retrieve a rabbit-ear antenna. There, he watched television, found a fan and a recliner, and rummaged for a can of chicken noodle soup. He connected a microwave and made himself a hot meal. These concrete comforts—electricity, a fan, a chair, television, soup—stood in marked contrast to the hospital’s powerless, overheated conditions.

He did not keep every advantage to himself. Dosch made coffee for nurses and carried fans to Memorial’s second-floor lobby, where small generators could run them and they could be directed toward patients. His gestures offered some relief within the hospital. But Rider and Schafer were left with a larger unanswered question: why were patients not moved on gurneys into the more comfortable cancer center, or into air-conditioned cars and trucks? The evidence records the question, not a resolution or an explanation from Dosch.

What He Knew and Disclosed

When Susan Mulderick spoke with Dosch about patients’ ability to survive, he recalled her saying that they were being made comfortable. In his interview, he described her concern in benign terms, and the investigators did not press him for details. He did not volunteer that he had seen a doctor inject a patient on the second floor, had asked Goux whether he knew what was happening, or had seen the chief nursing officer crying. Those omissions matter because his account to investigators was not the whole of what he had observed.

Dosch later said he had not understood what a major public issue the events might become until two CNN employees appeared at his home. After the disaster, he confronted Mulderick; she denied having spoken of medicating the patients. Meanwhile, people from Memorial largely avoided discussing what had happened on Thursday, September 1. Dosch felt they were trying to protect themselves. He questioned whether patients might have lived had they been evacuated and whether someone else had the right to decide for them that they would not make it. The account gives these doubts as questions he carried, not as a conclusion about what would have happened.

Conflicting Accounts of Rescue

Dosch’s recollection of the helicopter rescue plans also sits within a contested record. He remembered Tenet dispatching a fleet of helicopters, while leaving open the possibility that some staff members had not heard the news before a meeting ended. Mulderick told state investigators that she had learned about the helicopters from Dosch before the meeting and announced that they were coming, though she did not know when they would arrive. Karen Wynn’s recollections and Tenet officials’ Wednesday-night emails indicated that some people at Memorial knew of the helicopters the previous evening. The dispute was not simply over whether aircraft were coming, but over when the broader staff had been told; John Kokemor later told reporters that staff at the Thursday-morning meeting believed the hospital was on its own and became dejected.

Dosch’s recollection therefore cannot be treated as a settled account of what everyone knew. His own version preserved uncertainty about who had received the information, while other testimony and emails placed knowledge earlier for at least some people. In the narrative, that discrepancy reflects the difficulty of reconstructing decisions inside an institution where information, authority, and memory were unevenly distributed.

Aftermath and Memorial

On the anniversary of the deaths, Horace Baltz held a small memorial gathering at the corner of Napoleon and Clara Streets, praying with his sister and a few security guards. Memorial was weeks from partially reopening when Baltz saw Dosch hurry past. Baltz thought he looked ill at ease. Dosch later said he was probably deep in thought, and that if Baltz had not been invited to a separate anniversary gathering, the omission had been unintentional. The account preserves both the impression of the passing executive and Dosch’s alternative explanation without resolving the moment into deliberate rejection.

Dosch’s role in the book is thus defined by contrasts that remain unresolved: access to a functioning refuge alongside patients’ exposure to heat and power failure; practical aid in the form of coffee and fans alongside questions about why patients were not moved; and firsthand observations alongside later silences and disputed recollections. His testimony contributes not a final verdict on Memorial’s decisions, but a record of the distances between executive comfort, patient vulnerability, and what people were willing to say afterward.