Glenn Johnson

Glenn Johnson was the acting chief of staff at Lindy Boggs Medical Center during the hospital’s evacuation in Hurricane Katrina. As staff and rescuers sorted roughly 150 patients into triage categories, Johnson confronted the distance between a letter written on a patient’s forehead and the person whose fate it could determine. His account combines procedural decisions, a personal act of mercy, and a rescue effort that left the most critically ill behind for days.

Role at Lindy Boggs

Johnson served as acting chief of staff while Lindy Boggs struggled through conditions resembling those at Memorial Medical Center: no power, almost no communications, and delayed outside rescue. The hospital had no helipad, and staff initially ferried only able-bodied non-patients by boat. On Wednesday, firefighters arrived and directed small boats to take patients to a nearby post-office berm, where helicopters could pick them up. The approximately 150 patients were divided into A, B, and C categories.

The order of evacuation was contested. Some doctors and nurses believed the most critical patients, assigned category C, should be rescued first. The doctors and firefighters in charge instead left them until last, apparently concerned that medical care would not be available at the helicopter drop-off points. Asked to explain the protocol, firefighter Chris Shamburger offered little beyond the assertion that it was how such things were done. Johnson’s role placed him inside a system whose categories had practical consequences but whose rationale was not always clear to the people carrying it out.

Marking and Making Exceptions

Johnson described writing triage letters on patients’ foreheads with a permanent marker. The act disturbed him: he compared the marking to the treatment of people at Auschwitz and to cattle being marked. His reaction registered how an emergency classification could reduce a patient, in appearance, to a designation—even as workers were using that designation to organize an evacuation under severe constraints.

He also changed one patient’s assigned category. When a paralyzed woman’s husband offered to carry her, Johnson took pity on her and changed her from C to A, describing the decision as his one act of mercy for the day. The exception did not undo the triage system or rescue every critical patient first; it did show Johnson exercising judgment within it, responding to a specific patient and the commitment of the person accompanying her.

Lindy Boggs staff carried patients down multiple flights of stairs in sheets. Firefighters were instructed to withdraw before sundown because of safety concerns, leaving critically ill, hospice, and long-term acute-care patients behind. A handful of medical staff and other rescuers returned on Thursday, September 1, and began removing survivors in a small, stolen flatboat; other patients were taken out on Friday. The sequence made evacuation a stop-and-start operation rather than a single passage to safety.

Johnson’s Own Evacuation

Johnson flew out on Wednesday, August 31, but his departure did not take him directly to safety. Instead, he was dropped on an I-10 freeway cloverleaf with the patients. The reversal—an acting chief of staff evacuated alongside those whose care he had been trying to organize—underscored how little control any one person had over the broader rescue operation. His evacuation was another stage in the work, not its clean conclusion.

Public Account and Narrative Significance

A Dateline report centered on Johnson’s anguish over decision-making, his anger at the shortage of outside help, his ingenuity in replenishing medicines, and the strain of working in deadly, exhausting heat. The account brought the practical and moral pressures of the evacuation into public view: patients were sorted, carried, and left behind not in an abstract exercise but in a hospital where rescue resources and time were limited.

The book places Lindy Boggs alongside other New Orleans hospitals facing catastrophic conditions, but distinguishes the accounts rather than treating all their decisions as identical. At Charity Hospital, staff said they continued caring for patients in their rooms until the end despite severe threats and a later evacuation. Johnson’s story, by contrast, foregrounds the contested ordering of patients, his disturbing experience of marking them, and the individual exception he made. Together, these episodes show how emergency systems were experienced through both institutional rules and particular acts of care.