Freret neighborhood

Freret neighborhood, the area around Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, is presented as a place where recurrent flooding became familiar long before Hurricane Katrina made the risks impossible to ignore. The hospital’s location shaped both routine adaptations and the crisis of evacuation: water could surround its grounds, obstruct travel, and leave patients and staff dependent on limited rescue routes. The neighborhood’s story also intersects with the racial history of the hospital that stood within it.

Setting and Recurring Flood Risk

In the years after the 1927 flood, drainage improvements substantially increased New Orleans’s capacity to pump water, but they did not eliminate severe flooding around the Baptist Hospital site in Freret. By the early twenty-first century, even a moderate storm could leave enough water in nearby streets that Memorial employees parked a block away on raised median berms. Maintenance workers put on waders and ferried colleagues to work in a battered metal fishing boat kept suspended from the parking garage basement ceiling.

The contrast between citywide infrastructure investment and local vulnerability was striking. Memorial continued to store equipment, supplies, food, records, and linens in its basement, while many employees had come to regard water as an ordinary inconvenience rather than a serious threat. The book presents that habituation as part of the setting’s history: repeated exposure had produced practical workarounds, but familiarity did not make the hospital safe from a prolonged flood.

The Neighborhood During Katrina

When Mayor Ray Nagin ordered New Orleans evacuated, many residents lacked cars or other means of leaving, and the city’s plans to transport them had significant gaps. The New Orleans Superdome was designated as a last-resort shelter, and people unable to leave independently were directed toward it. At the same time, Acadian dispatchers faced a surge of requests to move patients from hospitals, nursing homes, and homes; many available ambulances were trapped in interstate traffic, and some took patients to the Superdome rather than out of the city.

At Memorial, the flooded Freret streets became a visible measure of how isolated the hospital was. From the hospital’s rooftop helipad, anesthesiologist Paul Primeaux could see water covering neighborhood streets, which reflected the treetops and upper portions of double-shotgun houses. The view extended south toward the Mississippi River and northeast toward downtown and the damaged Superdome. Although a military helicopter eventually landed on the helipad, the wider evacuation remained constrained by the water and by the limited routes available to patients, staff, and families.

Care, Evacuation, and Unequal Exposure

The hospital’s internal evacuation decisions played out within this neighborhood setting. Memorial doctors decided that patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders would be evacuated last, although such an order meant that a patient should not be revived after breathing or heartbeat stopped; it did not itself mean the patient should be denied rescue. On the fifth floor, staff stopped a bed-bound patient’s evacuation after seeing her DNR order. Her daughter later asked for the order to be canceled, explaining that she had not understood it to mean that her mother would be left behind. The patient was moved toward the helipad and survived the immediate ordeal.

The same crisis reached beyond the hospital’s walls. Water around the sloping grounds stabilized at about five to six feet, and an outpatient still made her way through the flood to Memorial for a scheduled chemotherapy appointment. Karen Wynn told her that chemotherapy would not be given that day. Another family arrived by boat with young children and was turned away. Physician Bryant King protested that the hospital should help them; Wynn believed Memorial could not take more people, while King was troubled that those refused were nearly all African American. The episode placed the hospital’s limited capacity, the surrounding community’s need, and questions of race in the same confined landscape.

History and Significance

Freret’s connection to Memorial also carries the history of racial exclusion at the hospital, which opened in 1926 as Southern Baptist Hospital. Jannie Burgess, an African American licensed practical nurse who worked for decades in New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes, was born only months after it opened. She could care for patients at many private hospitals but could not receive care at them; more than four decades passed before she could be a patient at Baptist. The hospital was among the last Southern institutions to integrate, refusing federal hospital programs in the mid-1960s rather than accept their nondiscrimination requirements.

During Katrina, Burgess was among the four DNR patients in Memorial’s intensive care unit who were placed last under the evacuation decision. Her presence connected the hospital’s historical exclusion to the crisis unfolding there, without making the two forms of vulnerability identical: one concerned access to care across decades, the other a disaster-time rule that delayed evacuation. More broadly, Freret shows how disaster exposure accumulates through place. Flood-prone streets, constrained transport, hospital infrastructure, and uneven access to assistance converged around a medical center whose routines had long adapted to water but whose adaptations could not resolve the consequences of a citywide emergency.