René Goux

René Goux was the chief executive of Memorial Medical Center during the hospital’s Katrina emergency. The book depicts him not through personal history but through a series of institutional decisions made as floodwaters isolated the building, evacuation remained incomplete, and staff faced competing demands for safety, shelter, and care. His role became especially visible at the hospital’s perimeter: deciding where people approaching Memorial should go, and whether those who reached it would be admitted.

Executive Role and Crisis Setting

Goux’s authority was exercised within a citywide evacuation that could not move everyone to safety. Some residents lacked cars or other means of escape, while officials knew that transportation plans had serious gaps. Acadian dispatchers were overwhelmed by requests to move patients from hospitals, nursing homes, and homes; many ambulances were stuck in interstate traffic, and some began carrying patients to the Superdome rather than out of the city. These conditions help explain the pressure around Memorial’s doors, but the account does not assign Goux responsibility for the city’s evacuation failures.

The hospital’s immediate problem was both medical and logistical. Patients and staff remained inside while rescue was uncertain, and hundreds of patients’ relatives and other visitors were also still at Memorial. On the emergency-room ramp, an evacuation line extended through the emergency department and reception area. At a staff gathering there, Goux stood beside incident commander Susan Mulderick, with medical chairman Richard Deichmann also present. The gathering brought together doctors, nursing managers, maintenance workers, and security staff; the crowd and noise made it difficult to hear. Goux appears in this scene as part of the hospital’s leadership, amid a response that had to account for people, supplies, and the movement of those still inside.

Controlling Access to the Hospital

Goux had decided that, for safety, people approaching Memorial should generally be directed to dry ground at Napoleon Avenue and St. Charles Avenue, nine blocks away. The location was also where Sandra LeBlanc had identified that boat passengers leaving Memorial could be discharged. This policy placed a substantial distance between the hospital and people arriving through the flood, rather than treating the building as an open refuge.

The restriction had a security precedent. The previous day, a Coast Guard auxiliary member in Alexandria, Louisiana, had told Memorial staff by telephone to secure the premises, post men at doors and windows, and refuse entry to anyone not in uniform. The account presents this instruction as part of the setting for Goux’s access policy; it does not establish that the auxiliary member’s call was a formal order from the Coast Guard or that every refusal followed from it.

The limits were tested when an ill woman and her husband arrived on a mattress propelled through the water by several men. After a heated exchange, a sympathetic doctor persuaded administrators to admit the couple. The men who had brought them were nevertheless told to leave. The woman was carried on a stretcher into the emergency-room hallway, where Karen Wynn went to assess her and found that she was still breathing, though barely. Her husband described a condition for which she had been expected to die soon. The episode shows the distinction the hospital was making between taking in people who appeared to need immediate care and allowing those accompanying them to remain.

Disagreement Over Who Could Be Helped

A second encounter made the cost of the boundary more explicit. A couple arrived by boat with small children and were told to go away. Bryant King, a young hospital-based physician, challenged Goux, insisting that the hospital had to help people. The family was refused despite King’s advocacy. The account records the disagreement as a clash over admission under extreme limits, not as evidence that the family’s needs were assessed and found manageable.

The episode also carries a racial dimension, though the witnesses understood it differently. Wynn, who was African American, did not perceive racism in the refusals; nearly all the people being turned away were African American. King, the only African American doctor on duty and one of very few at the hospital, was offended in large part by the fact that those refused had dark skin. He chose not to make race the explicit basis of his confrontation, believing it would make people defensive. The disagreement therefore does not resolve into a single shared interpretation: King saw a troubling racial pattern, while Wynn understood the refusals as a response to a hospital already at capacity.

The narrative sets this dispute against the incongruity of Memorial sheltering dogs and cats while babies passed over polluted water in unstable small boats. That contrast does not prove that the hospital could safely have admitted every person at its doors. It does sharpen the question raised by Goux’s policy: what counted as a legitimate claim on a hospital’s remaining capacity, and who had the authority to decide when the limits had been reached.

Security, Capacity, and Institutional Judgment

Goux’s security concerns are also visible in the way Ewing Cook interpreted the refusal of the family with children. Cook considered King out of touch with reality. In his view, Memorial had become a shelter running short of supplies that needed to be emptied, and he feared that people entering from the neighborhood might steal drugs or valuables. Cook had kept a semiautomatic Beretta in his scrub-pants pocket after hearing a report that a nurse had been assaulted near the hospital; Goux had told him to take the weapon out of his briefcase and carry it. The detail establishes that Goux authorized a specific security measure, while the threat assessment around it included rumor as well as fear.

These scenes make Goux’s position consequential without reducing it to a simple choice between compassion and indifference. He was a hospital executive working amid crowding, depleted supplies, uncertain rescue, and warnings to secure the building. At the same time, directing people away and refusing a family with children meant that those seeking help encountered an institution deciding whom it would admit. The book leaves the tension visible: security measures could protect a strained hospital, but they also narrowed access to the very shelter and care that people outside it were seeking.