L. René Goux

L. René Goux was the chief executive officer of Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina, a comparatively recent appointee confronting a hospital emergency whose operational command fell to nursing director Susan Mulderick. He was on site, communicated concerns about patient care and the threat of power loss to Tenet Healthcare, and later said he had not known about the injections that became central to the investigation of patient deaths. His place in the story is defined by that uneasy combination: executive responsibility in a failing institution, efforts to prepare for evacuation, and disputed accounts of what staff understood his instructions to mean.

Identity and Position

Goux had been sent by Tenet Healthcare to run Memorial Medical Center in 2003. When the hurricane response began, he had been at the hospital far less time than Mulderick, whose thirty-two years there gave her a much longer institutional history. She had directed sixteen nursing departments and led the hospital’s emergency committee for more than fifteen years. Although the emergency plan typically assigned the incident-command role to the chief executive, Mulderick led the response as incident commander. Goux was present alongside her, but the distinction between executive authority and operational command matters: the decisions and emergency operations were not described as his alone.

Warnings and the Evacuation Problem

As floodwater threatened the hospital, Memorial’s vulnerabilities became increasingly urgent. Eric Yancovich had warned before Katrina that relatively little water could disable much of the medical center. He recommended elevating electrical transfer switches and pumps supplying medical air and vacuum suction, but the proposed electrical work would have cost more than a quarter of a million dollars and was deferred for lack of capital. Floodgates and a raised vent for underground diesel tanks offered some protection, but the backup-generator system remained vulnerable at its weakest points.

Yancovich understood that evacuation might be necessary, as did Mulderick. She advised Goux, who spoke with his superiors at Tenet Healthcare in Dallas; he told them that evacuation appeared likely. On Monday, when Memorial had only about a day’s supply of some medicines left, Goux asked community relations manager Sandra Cordray to convey the hospital’s concerns to corporate executives. Her email described the threat to patient care from high floodwaters and continued power loss, and said that evacuation options were under consideration as a contingency. The exchange records both an effort to alert the company and the uncertainty of a plan that staff hoped they might not have to use.

Instructions, Authority, and Conflicting Accounts

Goux’s communications with staff acquired greater significance as the evacuation became more pressing. He told John Thiele that everyone had to be out by nightfall. Mulderick gave Thiele the same message. Thiele was left wondering what would happen to the patients who remained, while Goux and Mulderick later explained that they had meant to concentrate their exhausted colleagues on evacuation, not impose a deadline to empty the hospital. Goux also recalled that helicopter service to the hospital had stopped before and that he did not want staff to lose another opportunity to evacuate. The contrast between the instruction Thiele remembered and the leaders’ later account does not establish what Goux intended in every exchange; it does show how, amid exhaustion and danger, a message meant to mobilize staff could be understood as a final order.

His executive role also sat within a wider corporate structure. Tenet Healthcare had sent him to manage Memorial, and Goux contacted its Dallas leadership as the hospital’s risks grew. The available account records that he communicated the possibility of evacuation and relayed concerns about patient care; it does not portray him as having control over every resource or decision made at the hospital. Nor does it resolve how responsibility was divided among hospital leadership, corporate executives, and the people managing operations on site.

Aftermath and Significance

Goux’s later statements addressed the most serious allegation to emerge from the crisis. He did not respond to a request to fact-check the book’s account. In a 2009 interview, when asked about injections on Memorial’s seventh floor, he said he had not known they were occurring. He told state investigators in 2005 that he had heard rumors of euthanasia soon after leaving the hospital and that the reports had shocked him. Those statements concern his knowledge and response after departure; they do not independently settle what happened to patients or what other people knew.

The book’s comparison with Charity Hospital places Memorial’s leadership crisis in a broader institutional frame, rather than making Goux personally responsible for the different outcomes. Charity had also lost power and essential services, faced severe evacuation obstacles, and cared for a larger patient population with fewer staff per patient. Its staff used portable generators to power ventilators and monitors, maintained hospital routines, and evacuated its sickest patients first; fewer than ten patients died there. Against that contrast, Goux’s communications reveal the limits of alerting corporate leadership and considering evacuation when a hospital’s emergency systems and command arrangements were under strain. His account remains bound to a consequential ambiguity: he was the chief executive on site, but the record distinguishes his executive position from Mulderick’s operational command and preserves disagreement about what his words required of an exhausted staff.