Disaster medical relief at New Orleans airport after Hurricane Katrina

Disaster medical relief at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport after Hurricane Katrina turned an airport into a makeshift hospital, but the effort was also a stark test of who could provide care, who controlled the response, and what happened to patients deemed too ill to save. The book presents the operation through accounts of Disaster Medical Assistance Teams, published medical reports, and a congressional investigation that described a confused command structure and a medical effort in which many people died.

An airport becomes a hospital

After the storm, medical teams treated patients at the airport as emergency medical needs overwhelmed the region. The accounts cited in the book include the experiences of Disaster Medical Assistance Teams WA-1 and OR-2, as well as reports on the mass medical evacuation and treatment effort. Together they portray an improvised hospital operating within a larger, fragmented response rather than a single, smoothly coordinated rescue system.

That fragmentation affected who could help. The congressional investigation reported that doctors who were not members of the federal teams, including John Thiele, were turned away. The airport could therefore be both a destination for people needing treatment and a place where professional access was restricted by the boundaries of the response organization.

Triage and the separation of the sickest

The House report characterized the airport medical effort as “chaotic” and described patients dying while care was strained. One doctor quoted in the report said personnel “black tagged” the sickest patients and moved them away from others “so they could die in a separate area.” The reported practice made triage more than a way to sort urgency: it physically separated some patients whose condition appeared least survivable, leaving the boundary between allocating scarce care and abandoning people starkly visible.

These accounts do not present the airport as a simple story of rescue or refusal. Medical personnel were operating amid extreme need, yet the report’s description of isolation and deaths records how decisions and procedures could compound the crisis for people already most vulnerable. The turn-away of unaffiliated doctors further suggests that a system’s rules for controlling access could constrain potential sources of care even when the demand was overwhelming.

Command structure and institutional consequences

The confusion had an organizational history. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the National Disaster Medical System, which includes the Disaster Medical Assistance Teams, was moved from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security as part of a broad governmental redesign. The House report linked the resulting command confusion to the airport medical response.

After Katrina, the National Disaster Medical System was returned to the Department of Health and Human Services, which coordinates federal health resources in emergencies through Emergency Support Function-8. The change was an institutional response to a practical problem revealed by the disaster: medical resources require a clear coordinating structure, not simply teams and supplies on the ground.

Lessons carried forward

The book traces the airport episode beyond Katrina. In response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the National Disaster Medical System again faced supply-chain and procurement problems; supplies arrived that included heaters instead of air conditioners, while bottled oxygen, fuel, and equipment for operations ran short. The comparison shows that organizational reform alone did not eliminate the logistical vulnerabilities exposed in disaster relief.

The account also notes subsequent changes: the system revamped supply, resupply, and logistics processes, including distributing supply caches around the country for use by any team and anticipating specialized needs such as bariatric beds. Disaster Medical Assistance Teams used smaller strike teams for a more flexible response to Superstorm Sandy in 2012, while Health and Human Services behavioral-health teams later supported responders and communities affected by mass shootings and bombings. These developments frame the airport operation as both an emergency response and a warning: coordination, adaptable staffing, and appropriate supplies shape whether medical relief reaches people when ordinary systems fail.