Memorial Medical Center airboat evacuation

The Memorial Medical Center airboat evacuation was an improvised rescue effort in which volunteers, hospital staff, and relatives used small boats to reach patients isolated by floodwater. It opened a route into the hospital when official coordination faltered, but the boats carried only a few people at a time, and poor connections to ambulances and other transport left patients waiting. The LeBlanc family’s rescue of Vera LeBlanc showed both the possibility of individual action and the limits of a system that had already sorted patients into evacuation priorities.

Conditions Behind the Rescue

Memorial’s vulnerability had been identified before the storm. After Hurricane Ivan narrowly missed the city in 2004, plant operations director Eric Yancovich studied government storm-surge models and calculated how flooding could disable the hospital. On lined paper, he mapped entrances and outdoor equipment against Magnolia Street’s elevation. His calculations showed that less than four feet of water on the street could reach the loading dock, while parts of the emergency power distribution system sat below ground or only slightly above it. Yancovich warned that relatively little flooding could disable much of the Medical Center and recommended moving vulnerable switches and pumps; the proposed electrical work was not approved because of limited capital.

As floodwater rose, that weakness became immediate. Memorial’s generators had been running for two days, although the hospital’s plans assumed they could support operations for at least three. Staff tried to repair failures and redistribute electrical loads, but water threatened low-lying transfer switches and distribution panels. At about two a.m. on Wednesday, August 31, the last backup generator surged and stopped. The blackout compounded the heat and disrupted care, making the hospital’s need for evacuation more urgent even as transport remained scarce.

The city’s wider evacuation had also left many residents without a practical way out. The mandatory order did not solve the shortage of vehicles and drivers; some ambulances were trapped in traffic, and the region’s largest ambulance company was overwhelmed by requests. On Tuesday evening, a Tenet regional director reported that floodwater was rising around Memorial and another company hospital. State emergency medical services logs designated the hospitals a high-priority mission, but the volunteer sent to coordinate fifty-five boats reported that they had been stopped because of darkness and fears of gunfire. When Sandra LeBlanc sought help for the hospital, she was told it had become a second priority and was directed to join the boats at sunrise and do what she could.

Volunteers Find a Route

Sandra and Mark LeBlanc had evacuated north before the storm. After learning that New Orleans had flooded, they returned on Tuesday, intending to reach Mark’s mother, Vera, a LifeCare patient at Memorial, and her sitter. They first registered as volunteers with the state emergency medical services bureau in Baton Rouge. Sandra then worked at a freeway-interchange triage site, helping sort patients and direct some toward ambulances, while seeing how little could be done for the many people who needed shelter, food, and water. Although officials had called for boats to assist with rescues, she saw boats still sitting on trailers along the interstate.

At daylight on Wednesday, the LeBlancs went to a Sam’s Club parking lot where boat pilots had gathered. Two Cajun volunteers with airboats were looking for directions to hospitals. The LeBlancs explained Vera’s situation and Memorial’s conditions, then offered to guide the pilots there. They explored a possible route and launched near Jefferson Highway, just east of Ochsner Medical Center and close to the Orleans Parish line. From there, the route followed the highway toward Memorial and Claiborne Avenue, reversing the way the LeBlancs had used to leave the city.

The boats moved through flooded streets where people stood in deep water and signaled for help. The LeBlancs could direct them toward dry land, but the boats were headed to the hospital. When they arrived, Mark climbed seven flights to LifeCare and found Vera in a hot, still ward, on a wet bed and asking for water. He and Sandra brought her comfort and then sought help organizing the evacuation. Diane Robichaux, a senior LifeCare leader, told them she had little information and no working means to contact her corporate office for ambulances. The LeBlancs offered to call using their cell phone. An ambulance company would not dispatch vehicles without an exact address for the proposed drop-off point; the call was lost while staff tried to identify one. Robichaux then contacted a LifeCare representative in Shreveport, who agreed to try to divert ambulances and locate ventilator patients who had already been transferred.

Triage and the Limits of Boat Capacity

With more than one hundred Memorial and LifeCare patients remaining, staff needed a way to order the evacuation. They lacked enough official, color-coded armbands, so they assigned patients numbers. Category 1 included people in relatively good condition who could sit or walk; category 2 patients needed more assistance; category 3 included patients judged very ill and those with do-not-resuscitate orders. Anna Pou helped coordinate the movement of patients, while staff searched for cots and stretchers and carried patients down to the second-floor lobby.

In dim light, nurses reviewed charts with flashlights and wrote each patient’s category on paper with a marker, attaching the number to clothing or a hospital gown. Roughly three dozen category 1 patients were gathered near the emergency-room ramp for the initial airboat runs. Around seventy category 2 patients waited along a corridor leading toward the parking garage and helipad; about eighteen category 3 patients were placed near a bank ATM and a planter in the second-floor lobby. Staff continued basic care, including changing diapers, fanning patients, and offering water to those able to drink, but most other medical interventions had been sharply limited after patients were moved from their rooms. One doctor considered the numbered sorting efficient but distasteful.

Each of the two initial airboats could carry only three or four passengers besides its pilot. Their first drop-off point was more than three miles away, and a round trip took over an hour as pilots moved cautiously around debris. Sandra found a closer location near a Rite Aid and a Copeland’s Restaurant, nine blocks south of Memorial, at the dry strip of land along the city’s southwest border. But no ambulances were waiting there, and evacuees had to wade through dirty, shallow water to reach dry ground. The intended connection between boats and road transport was not reliably in place.

As the day went on, the boat operation shifted. At first, the boats were intended for patients who could travel, but the loading process also carried hospital employees and family members away from Memorial. By late afternoon, Sandra had helped load boats for hours, yet only a few patients had left: helicopters came rarely, and ambulances did not arrive at the drop-off point. The boats offered an exit, not a complete evacuation system.

Vera LeBlanc’s Rescue

Vera remained far back in the patient queue. Her gown bore family names and phone numbers that Mark and Sandra had written on it after being told she would leave by helicopter. Instead, she was among the patients placed near the ATM and planter. Her do-not-resuscitate order dated from a request made more than a decade earlier, not from a recent decision that she was dying; her heart was still beating. The category system nevertheless placed patients with such orders in the last group for evacuation.

As afternoon turned toward evening, the LeBlancs decided they could not leave Vera for another night. The airboats were running low on fuel, and their pilots had heard reports of people shooting at rescuers. They also understood that the volunteers might not return on Thursday, while hundreds remained at Memorial. When the LeBlancs tried to lift Vera’s cot, it bent under her weight. Several doctors told them they could not take her. Sandra insisted that they would proceed, and the LeBlancs, helped by two volunteers, carried Vera down to the emergency-room ramp.

They lifted her through an opening where hospital workers had removed a pane of Plexiglas and fitted her with earmuffs for the boat ride. Vera appeared pleased to be leaving and announced that she was on a boat. Before departing, Sandra also helped a hospital security guard who had worked with her on the ramp get aboard. Their departures were personal rescues within a larger operation that remained incomplete: roughly two dozen category 1 patients were still waiting in wheelchairs on the ramp.

Significance and Aftermath

The airboat evacuation exposed the distance between a declared rescue priority and the practical ability to reach people. The state’s response had shifted Memorial down the priority list; the volunteer pilots needed directions, and the hospital lacked a dependable ambulance connection at the landing points. Flooded streets, limited boat capacity, depleted fuel, and uncertain routes imposed their own constraints. The effort depended on people such as the LeBlancs, whose knowledge of the city and personal connection to a patient made them guides as well as rescuers.

The evacuation also brought the consequences of hospital triage into view. Category numbers helped staff organize more than one hundred patients in conditions of darkness and scarce transport, but the decision to place DNR patients last meant Vera’s existing directive affected her position in the line, although it did not express a wish to forgo evacuation. Her family’s decision to carry her onto a boat interrupted that ordering. The scene therefore distinguishes a patient’s instruction about resuscitation from a broader judgment about whether that person should be rescued.

The boats did not resolve the underlying failures. A later accounting of the disaster identified uncoordinated rescue efforts, poor communications, inadequate hospital backup systems, and the absence of sufficient transport among the factors that contributed to deaths and suffering. At Memorial, the airboats made evacuation possible in the flooded streets, but they could not compensate for the long-recognized vulnerabilities of the hospital’s electrical system or the fragmented arrangements needed to move patients from water to safety.