Jefferson Parish is presented as a neighboring jurisdiction whose officials and emergency responders were caught up in the regional rescue crisis after Hurricane Katrina. Its place in the account is defined less by a description of its boundaries than by the work of moving people through an overwhelmed system: a rescue staging point west of New Orleans filled with survivors, but lacked the buses and drivers needed to carry them onward.

Regional Emergency Response

As floodwaters isolated New Orleans, Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard appealed for more armed military police, describing growing anger among people without food, shelter, or a decent environment. His comments formed part of a wider climate of alarm. Reports and rumors about violent disorder circulated through radio broadcasts and rescue networks; the book later notes that fears of violence often exceeded the violence itself, and that some people described as looters were searching for food and water. The parish’s role in this episode is therefore twofold: its leader pressed for resources amid genuine deprivation, while the surrounding reports show how uncertain information could shape the rescue effort.

The Staging Point West of New Orleans

After registering as volunteers with the state emergency medical service in Baton Rouge, paramedic Sandra LeBlanc and her husband traveled toward New Orleans, eventually joining firefighters heading to a triage point at the Causeway Boulevard interchange. The site became a search-and-rescue base where helicopters could make rapid trips into the flooded area and bring people back to land. Thousands of survivors were gathered there amid debris and downed light poles that had been cleared to facilitate helicopter landings. The scene revealed a crucial limit: aircraft could extract people from the flood zone, but that did not ensure they could be transported to shelter or care.

The staging plan was only partly realized. The Hurricane Pam exercise had envisioned 600 buses and 1,200 drivers to collect people delivered to the interchange; those resources were not provided. At the site, an ambulance-company leader called for basic provisions and transport, while Sandra joined exhausted former EMT students in sorting patients. She examined injured and sick people, including people with diabetes and amputations, and directed some toward ambulances bound for Baton Rouge. For most of the crowd, however, she had no immediate help to offer. Medical teams guarded limited food and water for their own operations, leaving people who had endured the flood without the supplies they urgently needed.

Rescue, Rumor, and Systemic Failure

The interchange’s shortfall was part of a wider breakdown in evacuation and relief. Ambulances were trapped in traffic or overwhelmed with calls; in some cases, they carried patients to the Superdome instead of out of the city. Boats that officials had requested for water rescues were later seen lined up on the interstate on trailers. The rescue base could bring people out of flooded neighborhoods, but the missing onward transport left survivors stranded at the point of arrival.

The book places these local pressures within a broader chain of causes behind the deaths and suffering after the storm: a delayed mandatory evacuation order, too few buses and drivers, uncoordinated rescue efforts, poor communications, and fear of lawlessness that interrupted some operations. Jefferson Parish’s presence in this account thus marks the regional character of the crisis. The danger did not stop at the city line, and neither did the demands on the people and institutions trying to respond.