Mark LeBlanc—Sandra LeBlanc

Mark LeBlanc—Sandra LeBlanc describes a marriage tested and made visible through a shared rescue mission: after evacuating New Orleans, the couple returned by airboat to find Mark’s mother, Vera, a patient at Memorial Medical Center. Mark knew the hospital as the place where he had been born and his family had long received care; Sandra brought emergency-medical experience and helped organize the journey and evacuation effort. Together they navigated a fragmented response, helped bring boats to the hospital, and challenged the barriers that kept Vera among the patients waiting to leave.

A Family Mission

Mark and Sandra had evacuated New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, taking shelter with a relative in northern Louisiana. When news came that the city had flooded, they set out on Tuesday to reach Memorial and retrieve Mark’s mother, Vera, and her sitter. Their return began in a six-cylinder Chevy Silverado, but they knew that getting to the hospital would require more than simply driving back into the city.

Sandra was a paramedic and coordinator of the Emergency Medical Technology program at Elaine P. Nunez Community College in Chalmette. Her earlier work administering state EMT exams gave her a point of contact with emergency-response officials. The couple first went to the Bureau of Emergency Medical Services in Baton Rouge to obtain volunteer identification badges. When registration staff asked for their next of kin, Sandra was frightened by the request; when told to report to a triage center near a freeway interchange west of New Orleans, they followed the instruction. Their approach was practical and shared: they sought authorization, gathered information, and kept moving toward Vera.

Finding a Route to Memorial

At the triage center, the LeBlancs learned that Memorial was being prioritized last among the hospitals. They could not understand why a hospital without power, where people were becoming desperate and dying, would be left so late in the response. When one of two airboat captains asked whether they knew how to reach it, Mark could answer from personal knowledge. He had been born there when it was known as Baptist, and his family had always gone there for care; he had visited Vera only days earlier.

The captains agreed to take their boats to Memorial if the LeBlancs could guide them. The couple led them to a launch point on Jefferson Highway, just east of Ochsner Medical Center and near the Orleans Parish line. From there, they explained, the route ran along the highway and became Claiborne Avenue. It was the reverse of the way they had used to evacuate the city. Once the boats launched, the LeBlancs traveled with them through flooded streets, directing people they passed toward dry ground while explaining that they could not stop because they were heading to the hospital.

At Memorial, Mark borrowed a flashlight from a nurse and climbed seven flights of stairs to LifeCare Hospitals of New Orleans. He found Vera, eighty-two, lying on a wet bed, overheated and thirsty. Her calm description of her situation as a mess did not lessen his anger at what he saw. He went to fetch Sandra; the two comforted Vera and then sought out Diane Robichaux, the senior leader on the floor, to understand what was happening and offer help.

Turning Arrival into an Evacuation Effort

The LeBlancs told Robichaux they had brought airboats and planned to find more. Sandra identified the need for ambulances at the drop-off point so that patients could be taken onward after leaving the water. Robichaux said she could no longer contact her corporate office to request them. The couple therefore offered to arrange the ambulances themselves using their working cell phone, and called an ambulance company with Robichaux on the line. Their offer met a logistical obstacle: the company required an exact address, which the group could not provide for the proposed site near the railroad tracks.

Sandra spent hours helping load the boats as hospital visitors and staff left throughout Wednesday. The promised flow of transport did not materialize: helicopters arrived only rarely, and ambulances failed to come to the boat drop-off point. Only a few patients left Memorial during the day. Mark was caring for Vera in the second-floor lobby when Sandra found him late that afternoon and urged that his mother be taken out. Vera had been placed far back in the evacuation line, and her gown bore the family names and telephone numbers Mark and Sandra had written on it after being told she would leave by helicopter. Instead, she remained near an ATM and a planter.

Vera had a DNR order, but it reflected a request made more than a decade earlier about restarting her heart if it stopped, not a recent request to forgo rescue. Her heart was still beating. The couple’s experience of the evacuation therefore brought a broad policy into immediate family focus: a designation intended to guide resuscitation had also placed Vera among those delayed for evacuation. Earlier, a staff member had tried to keep them out of the patient-care area. Mark warned that they had brought the boats and could take them away, making clear that access to the resource they had supplied could not be separated from their ability to reach his mother.

Defying the Queue

The couple weighed the risks together. Their boats were running low on fuel, and the pilots had heard that rescuers were being shot at. The volunteers did not plan to return on Thursday, although hundreds of people remained at Memorial. No further helicopters were expected that day, and the LeBlancs did not know where they could take Vera; they concluded that another night in the hospital was worse than an uncertain destination elsewhere.

They decided to carry her cot downstairs and put her aboard one of the airboats they had directed to Memorial. The cot bent under her weight as they lifted it, so they had to readjust. Several doctors told them they could not take her. Sandra refused to yield and told them to help or move aside. The account leaves the immediate outcome of this attempt unresolved, but the action defines the couple’s role: they had not only found a way back to Vera, but brought transport, organized a route, tried to secure ambulances, and finally acted against the delay that had kept her waiting.

Their partnership also stands against the scale of the hospital’s failures without reducing their effort to a private rescue alone. Mark’s familiarity with Memorial helped guide the boats; Sandra’s professional knowledge helped identify the practical requirements for receiving patients. Their family obligation became a form of improvisational emergency response, exposing the distance between a hospital’s evacuation priorities and the needs of the people left in its care.