Paul Primeaux

Paul Primeaux, an anesthesiologist at Memorial Medical Center, appears in the Katrina account at a point when evacuation was no longer a single, orderly operation. Patients, employees, relatives, and people arriving from flooded streets all needed decisions about where they could go and who could help them. Primeaux moved between the hospital’s command center, the emergency entrance, and the helipad; his brief but consequential actions expose the gap between the will to rescue and the institutions’ ability to carry rescue through.

Identity and Role

The evidence identifies Primeaux as an anesthesiologist and places him among Memorial’s medical personnel during the crisis. It gives little background about his life before the storm. Instead, it follows him through the practical responsibilities of a hospital in emergency conditions: assessing what was happening around the building, supporting evacuation, and relaying information between staff and rescue teams.

That work unfolded within a citywide evacuation already constrained by transportation shortages. New Orleans residents without cars had been directed toward the New Orleans Superdome, while calls for patient transport overwhelmed Acadian Ambulance and some ambulances were trapped in traffic. At Memorial, aircraft and boats offered a way out, but each rescue depended on coordination and on a judgment about which patients could be moved. Primeaux’s role was not to resolve the whole system’s failures; it was to act within this narrowing set of choices.

Families at the Emergency Entrance

One night, Primeaux came to Memorial’s incident-command office to report that conditions outside the emergency department were becoming difficult. About a dozen people had arrived by boat with their children, seeking food and assistance. The National Guard had departed, and officers from the New Orleans Police Department were preparing to leave without telling the hospital security staff where to direct the families.

Primeaux and the security officers planned to provide food and explain that Memorial was no longer evacuating patients, directing the families instead toward the New Orleans Superdome. That advice carried a serious uncertainty: the Superdome was more than two miles away, and reports reaching staff suggested that people there were trying to escape worsening conditions. The governor had also announced that the building, crowded with stranded residents and lacking power, needed to be evacuated. Primeaux’s report thus joined two emergencies at the hospital’s threshold: the families’ immediate need for help and the danger of sending them onward to a destination whose conditions were deteriorating.

The episode also shows how the hospital’s perimeter had become part of the disaster rather than a boundary that kept it outside. People from the surrounding flooded area came to Memorial because it was a place where they might find shelter or assistance. Staff had to weigh their needs against the hospital’s own limited capacity and security concerns. Primeaux brought that situation into the command office, where the response remained shaped by the fragile evacuation effort.

The Overnight Rescue Offer

Before eleven that night, the United States Coast Guard offered to continue sending helicopters and boats to Memorial. Primeaux was the only clinical employee in the command center at the time and strongly supported continuing the evacuation. Without a radio, he ran down through the building and up to the helipad to alert the evacuation team. His response was immediate: a possible extension of the rescue effort had to reach the people positioned to act on it.

The offer, however, had already been declined before Primeaux arrived at the helipad. The darkness made the operation hazardous. A staff member had nearly fallen from the pad, and Primeaux himself had earlier stepped on its old, flat perimeter fencing and worried that it might not bear his weight. The landing area had been marked with industrial lantern flashlights secured by plastic ties, though staff did not realize that the white light could interfere with pilots’ night-vision goggles. Primeaux understood that the danger was real; what frustrated him was that the Coast Guard’s offer had been turned away.

The chronology is not entirely settled in the accounts described by the book. Primeaux later recalled taking a Coast Guard call in the command center and carrying the proposal to Richard Deichmann on the helipad, where Deichmann did not think continuing was advisable. Deichmann did not remember that particular exchange, although he described making the same decision later that night in his own account. The differing recollections preserve an important distinction: Primeaux’s support for another attempt is clear, while the precise exchange and timing are remembered differently by the participants.

Decisions, Memory, and Significance

The evacuation had already carried sixteen critically ill babies and most of the critically ill adult patients away from the hospital, twenty-five patients in all, as well as a stabbing victim. Fog then made flying difficult. When a Coast Guard Jayhawk arrived around eleven, its crew was prepared to begin evacuating those who remained, but someone on the helipad said no patients still needed to leave and asked that the crew return after daylight. The helicopter instead took an Acadian flight coordinator and medical equipment to Tulane Hospital. This sequence clarifies the stakes of Primeaux’s effort: backing the offer did not mean the night rescue proceeded, and his attempt to alert the helipad team could not reverse a decision already made.

Primeaux later recalled a phrase about adopting more of a surgeon’s attitude. The available account does not establish its full context, so it offers only a limited glimpse of how he remembered the need for decisive action. More concretely, his recorded actions show him identifying the needs outside the emergency department, endorsing another rescue attempt, and carrying the offer toward the helipad despite having no radio. His place in the narrative is defined by that movement between people in need and the structures meant to help them. The result is not a simple portrait of individual heroism: it is an account of a clinician trying to keep rescue possible within a hospital crisis governed by danger, incomplete communication, and decisions made by several people.