Memorial Medical Center backup-generator failure

The backup-generator failure at Memorial Medical Center was not a single mechanical breakdown but the collapse of an emergency-power system whose most vulnerable components had been identified before Hurricane Katrina. As floodwater reached the hospital’s electrical infrastructure, workers struggled to keep the generators running; at about two a.m. on August 31, 2005, the last one surged and died. The silence that followed marked a decisive loss of power for a hospital still sheltering patients and staff.

A Known Weak Point

After Hurricane Ivan’s near miss in 2004, plant operations director Eric Yancovich studied government storm-surge models and mapped the hospital’s entrances and outdoor equipment against the elevation of Magnolia Street. His hand-drawn calculations showed that less than four feet of street flooding could send water over the loading dock and into the hospital. Although the backup generators themselves stood on the second floor, parts of the emergency-power distribution system were below ground or only inches to a few feet above it.

Yancovich warned his supervisor that relatively little floodwater could disable most of the medical center. He expected that the main hospital would lose power and that patients would have to be moved to the newer Clara Wing, where he believed the electrical circuitry was better protected. The hospital had taken some defensive steps, including adding floodgates and raising the vent for underground diesel tanks, but the more extensive work Yancovich recommended remained undone.

Among his proposals were raising basement and ground-level emergency power transfer switches, as well as pumps supplying medical air and vacuum suction for patients with respiratory problems. A partial bid for electrical work exceeded a quarter of a million dollars. Yancovich wrote that, because capital was lacking, he did not expect the work to be approved and would keep the proposal on file. The distinction between elevated generators and vulnerable switches and distribution equipment would become critical once the flood arrived.

Two Days on Emergency Power

The hospital’s three teal-colored generators, each rated at 750 kilowatts, had already been running for two days when the struggle to keep them going intensified. Each could produce substantial power, but the equipment was not designed for prolonged operation. An outside company normally serviced the generators; Memorial’s maintenance staff mainly changed the oil and ran brief monthly tests. Those tests reflected standards designed for generators expected to support vital functions for minutes or hours, while the hospital’s disaster plan called for them to sustain the facility for at least three days.

None of the electricians or engineers on site was a generator mechanic. When one engine first shut down, workers concluded that it had overheated. Working by flashlight, they added water to its radiator and got it running again. Later, low oil pressure appeared to be a problem. Staff brought in barrels of diesel to prime the motors and retrieve more fuel from a generator in the surgery building. Meanwhile, power was failing in parts of the hospital, and the light in other areas seemed to weaken.

Floodwater Meets the Electrical System

The hospital’s electrical network had grown through successive additions to the original 1926 building, leaving a complicated system of overlapping circuits. When another generator failed and could not be restarted, engineers tried to transfer some of its load to a working generator. Wearing rubber boots, they waded through knee-deep basement water and climbed to a mezzanine in the core electrical building. The water itself pointed to a likely cause of the partial outages: about a third of the automatic transfer switches, which redirected power to the generators when utility service failed, were at a low level and appeared to be submerged along with associated distribution panels.

In a narrow hallway lined with electrical panels, the workers used a flashlight to find a metal bypass lever above their heads. They used it to connect the load from the failed generator to one that was still operating. A gauge then showed that the working engine was drawing too much current, suggesting a short circuit. The workers tried to separate the loads again, wary of fire: the sprinkler-system pumps were underwater, and city fire trucks were presumed to be out of service. To reduce demand, they shut off scattered branch circuits serving unused fixtures and equipment.

Another generator failed. This time the workers had a sense of what had gone wrong, but no spare parts. They tried to salvage parts from the failed equipment, without success. The effort to save the remaining power supply lasted about two hours. Nearly forty-eight hours after Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, the last backup generator surged and then died.

The Hospital After the Silence

Dr. Ewing Cook, trying to rest in his second-floor office, heard the sudden silence as the sickest sound of his life. Alarms began flashing and wailing on the eighth floor, where intensive-care nurses had settled for the night in rooms with patients they had rescued. Nurse manager Karen Wynn climbed onto a chair and struck an alarm panel with her shoe to quiet it, then told the nurses to try to sleep.

The loss of power disabled more than lighting. On the seventh floor, the LifeCare notepad computer lost its text-messaging connection, and the special mattress supporting Emmett Everett deflated. Ventilators continued to provide mechanical breaths, but only until their battery backups ran out. On another floor, a nurse hurried to enter notes into patients’ electronic charts before her laptop batteries died; the electronic medication cart would also stop working, leaving its medicines locked inside. These failures exposed how many parts of patient care depended on power beyond the generators themselves.

The disaster’s effects persisted in the people who had worked through it. Gina Isbell later described poor sleep, nightmares of patients’ faces, hair loss, and guilt about the staff she had chosen to work the storm and the patients who died. She had left the hospital by boat, physically and mentally drained, and learned that her home and community in St. Bernard Parish had been lost. After the 2007 grand jury decision, she remained angry that help had arrived too slowly and felt permanently changed by the storm. At times she drew comfort from a memory of her final hours on the helipad: Roy Culotta’s eighty-seven-year-old grandmother had told her that if she were alive the next day, it would be because of Isbell.

Wynn, too, found that recounting the events could bring their distress back with force. Preparing for a possible grand jury appearance meant reviewing what had happened with her lawyer; after some meetings, she needed weeks to feel able to move forward again. The generator failure was one moment in a wider emergency, but its progression—from a predicted weakness, through flooded switches and improvised repairs, to the final silence—made the hospital’s dependence on fragile infrastructure impossible to separate from the human consequences of the crisis.