Louisiana Emergency Medical Services Agency

The Louisiana Bureau of Emergency Medical Services was a state emergency-response office that registered volunteer medical personnel, received reports about threatened hospitals, and dispatched help during the flooding after Hurricane Katrina. Its records show both the scale of the effort and its limits: Memorial Medical Center was identified as an urgent evacuation mission, but a volunteer sent to coordinate boats could not connect with them; later, the hospital was reduced to a lower priority, and a family member with emergency-medical experience was told to help lead the effort herself.

Registration and a growing emergency

As New Orleans faced a mandatory evacuation, residents without their own transportation depended on public and volunteer assistance. Hospitals, nursing homes, and private homes all needed transport. The bureau’s registration desk in Baton Rouge became one point of contact for people hoping to take part in rescue work. Sandra LeBlanc, a former administrator of state emergency medical technician exams, went there with her husband, Mark, seeking credentials and a way to reach the city. She had left her own credentials behind and the bureau had run out of identification badges. When staff asked where the couple was going, Sandra asked where they were being sent; she was directed to a triage center at the I-10 and Causeway Boulevard Interchange.

The journey from registration to action was uncertain. Sandra and Mark waited at a fire station with rescue crews for much of the day, but no call came to send them toward New Orleans. Near evening, a few firefighters and their chief decided to drive to the triage point, and the LeBlancs joined them. There, arriving helicopters brought people to an improvised gathering place where medical workers had little food and water to spare. Sandra searched for information about hospital rescues while helping at the site, amid a broader response in which needs were visible but plans and resources were not reliably coordinated.

Memorial becomes an urgent mission

On Tuesday evening, Michael Arvin, Tenet’s regional business director, called the bureau in Baton Rouge from Dallas. He reported rapidly rising floodwater around Memorial Medical Center and Lindy Boggs Medical Center, said one of the hospitals had lost electricity, and asked the state for help. By 8:30 p.m., a bureau worker had recorded both hospitals as a high-priority evacuation mission.

About twenty minutes later, the bureau dispatched volunteer Carl Cramer from Baton Rouge to meet fifty-five boats and evacuate the two hospitals. The assignment depended on connecting a volunteer coordinator with boats in a city where movement and communication were already difficult. After midnight, Cramer reported that he had never met up with the boats. He had been told that they were stopped because of darkness and reports of snipers. Instead, he joined other emergency medical workers at the Causeway Boulevard interchange. The planned boat operation therefore did not translate into a coordinated hospital evacuation that night.

A family member becomes a link to command

In the middle of the night, Vera LeBlanc’s sitter called Sandra from Memorial. Sandra took the call outside the trailer and recognized Cramer, whom she knew through state emergency medical services work. She asked him to get the command center on the radio, hoping that officials would hear the sitter’s distress and give the hospital more attention. Her plea was entered in the bureau’s logs at 4:45 a.m. Wednesday: the sitter and nurses at Memorial were beginning to panic.

Sandra was told that Memorial was now considered second priority. The account describes no explanation for the change. The instruction she received was to go with the boats at sunrise, find a suitable launch point, and do what she could to help empty the hospital. This put a former state exam administrator who was no longer under contract with the bureau in a practical rescue role, even as she was seeking direction and assistance from state officials.

At daylight, the LeBlancs drove to the Sam’s Club parking lot near the edge of the floodwaters, where people and boats had gathered. Two boat operators were looking for someone to direct them. The LeBlancs told them about Vera and the conditions described by her sitter; one of the men went to seek further information and returned with word that an announcement was expected. The scene illustrates the difference between having boats and having a dependable system to assign them: volunteers were present, but the rescue effort still needed direction and usable information.

What the records reveal

The bureau’s later records continued to register the hospital’s need. A phone-call log for Thursday morning, September 1, noted that sixty patients at Memorial needed to be moved by stretcher. The entry documents a concrete transport requirement, but it does not, by itself, establish what assistance the bureau subsequently arranged for those patients.

The broader account places these events within a fragmented evacuation response. Hospital and nursing-home patients needed vehicles, boats, or other specialized transport; roads were clogged, available ambulances were strained, and rescue plans did not consistently connect people who could help with the institutions needing help. In its retrospective account of the disaster, the book identifies uncoordinated rescue efforts, poor communications, and disputes among agencies and levels of government among the causes that compounded the crisis. The bureau’s logs preserve a sequence of alerts, dispatches, and changing priorities, while also showing how recording a need or assigning a mission did not ensure that transportation reached the patients. The bureau’s role in the narrative is therefore not simply administrative: it is a window onto the gap between emergency-response plans and the practical coordination on which evacuation depended.