SARBOO

SARBOO refers to a search-and-rescue base of operations: a staging point intended to let helicopters make quick trips out of a flooded area, drop off evacuees, and return for more. The idea promised to stretch scarce air-rescue capacity, but its crucial next step—moving people from the staging points to safety—was never adequately arranged. The SARBOO sites thus exposed the difference between a rescue concept and a functioning evacuation system.

Definition and Planned Use

The Hurricane Pam exercise had proposed temporary landing points, described as lily pads, where helicopters could leave patients on their way to more definitive care. One such staging area was the cloverleaf at the I-10 and Causeway Boulevard Interchange, west of New Orleans. Rather than keep a helicopter occupied for hours on a long flight to an out-of-state hospital, pilots could make shorter trips into the flood zone and return more quickly.

The approach depended on coordination beyond the aircraft. Once people had been dropped off, ground transport and supplies had to carry them onward. But the arrangements for supplying the sites and transporting patients from them remained unfinished. The plan’s apparent efficiency in the air therefore relied on a missing link on the ground.

The Gap Between Plan and Operation

As Katrina advanced, hospitals across New Orleans needed evacuation while the region had relatively few medical transport helicopters. A long trip to a Tenet hospital outside the state could provide a patient with appropriate care, but would keep a helicopter unavailable for hours. The SARBOO concept offered a way to make more short trips, but without a system to receive and move the people delivered to the staging points, it could not complete the rescue chain.

At the interchange, the weakness became visible at scale. Officials had managed to carry out only half the Hurricane Pam concept: they had not provided the 600 buses and 1,200 drivers needed to pick up the people arriving by helicopter. Thousands gathered at the site, but the landing area alone could not get them onward to shelter, food, water, or medical care.

The Interchange as a Test of the System

Sandra LeBlanc reached the interchange with a group of firefighters and watched helicopters bring people down onto the debris-strewn ground. She found medical personnel and former EMT students, joined them in sorting patients, examined injured and sick people, and directed some—including people with diabetes and missing limbs—to ambulances heading to Baton Rouge. Her work helped some evacuees move on, but she could do nothing for most of those gathered there.

The shortage was not only a matter of buses at the SARBOO. Ambulances were also constrained: Acadian dispatchers were overwhelmed with calls, and many of the roughly two dozen ambulances made available were stuck on the interstate. Some began taking patients to the New Orleans Superdome rather than attempting to drive them out of the city. The resulting bottlenecks show why a landing point could not, by itself, amount to a complete evacuation plan.

Significance

SARBOO named a practical response to limited helicopter capacity, but its partial implementation turned the staging point into a place where rescue and abandonment could sit side by side: people had been brought out of immediate danger, yet many lacked onward transportation and basic supplies. The wider evacuation crisis involved delayed orders, insufficient buses and drivers, uncoordinated rescue efforts, and hospitals and nursing homes that had not evacuated before the storm. In that context, SARBOO’s central lesson is logistical: a rescue plan must connect airlift to ground transport and continuing care, or the point of transfer becomes another place where vulnerable people wait.