Ochsner Medical Center appears in the account as a landmark beside a makeshift rescue route, rather than as the destination of the operation. During the flooding after Hurricane Katrina, the nearby stretch of Jefferson Highway became the launch point from which airboats could travel toward Memorial Medical Center and return with patients.

Setting and Access

Mark LeBlanc and Sandra LeBlanc met two airboat captains who offered to pilot their boats to Memorial if the LeBlancs could guide them. After exploring a possible route, the group found water on Jefferson Highway just east of Ochsner Medical Center, near railroad tracks and the Orleans Parish line. The captains backed their trailers into the water and launched there.

The route made use of a road Mark knew from the opposite direction: days earlier, the LeBlancs had used it to evacuate New Orleans. From the launch point, they explained, the highway led toward Memorial and became Claiborne Avenue. Ochsner thus anchors the geography of the rescue effort: a recognizable point beside the flooded road, not the hospital the boats were trying to reach.

Proposed Patient Handoff

At Memorial, Mark found his eighty-two-year-old mother in LifeCare and then joined Sandra in seeking information about the hospital’s situation. They told Diane Robichaux, LifeCare’s senior leader on the floor, that they had brought airboats and planned to gather more. Sandra identified the launch site and warned that ambulances would be needed to collect patients there.

Because Robichaux could no longer contact her corporate office to request ambulances, the LeBlancs offered to call a company themselves using their working cell phone. Robichaux described the site by the railroad tracks near Ochsner, but the person taking the call insisted on an exact address before dispatching anyone. The proposed transfer point was therefore identified by nearby landmarks, yet that description was not precise enough to secure the road transport needed to complete the evacuation.

Narrative Function

The location links a flooded city route to the hospital’s effort to move patients: airboats could reach Memorial, but the plan also depended on ambulances meeting them at the launch site. The account’s movement from a highway marker near Ochsner to the requirement for an exact address makes the practical limits of improvised rescue visible. A route could be found and boats launched, while coordination for the next leg remained unresolved.