Sandra LeBlanc—Vera LeBlanc

Sandra LeBlanc—Vera LeBlanc is a family relationship tested by the breakdown of evacuation arrangements during the flooding after Hurricane Katrina. Sandra, a paramedic and emergency-medical educator, helped bring volunteer airboats to Memorial Medical Center and then challenged the delays that kept her eighty-two-year-old mother-in-law waiting inside. Their story moves from a search for a route into the city to a difficult decision to carry Vera out themselves.

Family Ties and the Crisis

Vera was a patient at LifeCare Hospitals of New Orleans, located inside Memorial Medical Center. Sandra and her husband, Mark LeBlanc, had evacuated New Orleans before the storm and were staying with a relative in northern Louisiana. When floodwater isolated the city, they returned to try to reach Vera and the sitter caring for her. Mark’s connection to Memorial was longstanding: he had been born there when it was known as Baptist, and his family had regularly received care there. For Sandra, the immediate task was to find a way back into a city that could no longer be reached by ordinary means.

Sandra brought relevant experience to that task. She was a paramedic and coordinated the Emergency Medical Technology program at Elaine P. Nunez Community College in nearby Chalmette. Although she was no longer under contract with the state, she and Mark drove to Baton Rouge to register as volunteers and receive identification badges. They hoped to help with a rescue operation and, above all, reach Vera. The journey joined family duty to practical emergency work: Sandra was not only searching for a relative but also trying to make a path into Memorial for rescuers.

Finding a Route to Memorial

During the night, Vera’s sitter called Sandra from the hospital. Sandra carried the phone out of the trailer where she was staying and found Carl Cramer, a volunteer she knew through the state emergency-medical program. She asked him to contact the command center by radio so officials would hear the sitter’s account of the deteriorating conditions. The request was entered into the state’s logs before dawn. Sandra was told that Memorial had become a lower priority and that she should join boats at sunrise, scout a launch point, and help evacuate patients.

At a staging area near the edge of the flood zone, Sandra and Mark met two airboat pilots who were looking for directions. They explained Vera’s situation and learned that the volunteers had not yet been assigned to Memorial. When officials announced destinations for the boats, Memorial was not among them; Sandra and Mark were told it had been placed last among the hospitals. The couple persisted. Mark knew where the hospital was, and the pilots agreed to go there if the LeBlancs could guide them. They drove to a launch site near Ochsner Medical Center and showed the pilots how to follow the route toward Memorial.

The LeBlancs’ return to the hospital was therefore both a private rescue attempt and an improvised response to a public coordination failure. Sandra had sought help through official channels, but the family ended up guiding volunteers themselves. Their familiarity with the city and Mark’s knowledge of Memorial turned into practical resources when the rescue system did not provide a clear route or timely direction.

Advocacy Inside the Hospital

Once at Memorial, Mark went upstairs to LifeCare and found Vera waiting in severe heat, without the intravenous fluids he believed she needed for dehydration and a persistent urinary infection. He returned with Sandra, and the two sought out Diane Robichaux, the senior LifeCare leader on the floor. They explained that airboats were available and identified where patients could be brought ashore, but that ambulances would be needed to take them onward. Sandra helped try to arrange those transfers using the couple’s working cell phone.

The effort exposed another gap. Robichaux could not reach her corporate office to request ambulances, and an ambulance company asked for an exact address the hospital staff could not supply. The call ended before they could reconnect. Robichaux then reached a LifeCare representative in Shreveport and asked whether ambulances intended for another staging area could be diverted to the airboat landing. The representative said she would try. The call also concerned ventilator-dependent patients who had already left and needed onward transfers. Sandra’s role was not limited to getting Vera out: she helped make the improvised landing usable for other patients by pressing for the ground transport that had to follow the boats.

By late afternoon, however, Vera had still not been evacuated. Helicopters were arriving only rarely, and ambulances had not appeared at the boat drop-off. Vera was among patients assigned DNR orders and was lying in the second-floor lobby, far from the head of the evacuation line. The family had written names and phone numbers on her hospital gown after being told she would leave by helicopter, but the expected departure had not happened. Her DNR order had been requested more than a decade earlier to prevent resuscitation if her heart stopped; it did not mean that she was then dying or that she wished to be left behind. Her heart was still beating.

Carrying Vera Out

With the airboats running low on fuel and their pilots unwilling to return the next day, Sandra and Mark decided that another night at Memorial was unacceptable. They did not know where they would take Vera, but chose to carry her downstairs and put her aboard one of the boats they had helped bring to the hospital. Several doctors objected that they could not take her. Sandra insisted that the family would proceed and told them they could either help or move aside. The conflict crystallized the difference between Vera’s position in the hospital’s evacuation order and her family’s understanding of their responsibility to her.

The LeBlancs, assisted by two volunteers, carried Vera’s cot to the emergency ramp and lifted her onto an airboat. The scene marked the culmination of Sandra’s efforts: she had helped locate the pilots, guided them through the flooded city, pressed hospital and corporate staff for transport, and finally joined Mark in removing Vera when the arranged evacuation had not reached her. Before leaving, Sandra also helped a hospital security guard who had worked with her on the ramp and was desperate to get out. The family’s rescue thus extended beyond their own immediate circle, even as Vera’s removal remained its central purpose.

Sandra and Mark’s actions do not establish what happened to Vera after the airboat departed, but they do establish the immediate outcome: she was no longer waiting inside Memorial. Their relationship is presented through concrete acts of care under pressure, and through Sandra’s refusal to treat an old DNR order as a reason to abandon a living patient. Against shifting priorities, interrupted communications, and the failure of promised transport, family knowledge and persistence became part of the evacuation itself.