September 6, 2005

September 6, 2005, is the day a hidden aftermath at Memorial Medical Center became visible beyond the flooded hospital. On that Tuesday, an MSNBC cameraman reached the building by kayak and filmed bodies in its chapel, turning a disaster that had already overwhelmed the hospital into a scene of public witness. The date also sits within a longer chain of warnings, failing infrastructure, and decisions that the book later examines as a crisis of preparedness and situational awareness.

Warnings Before the Flood

Before Hurricane Katrina, Memorial’s vulnerability had been identified in concrete terms. After Hurricane Ivan narrowly missed the city in 2004, plant operations director Eric Yancovich studied storm-surge models with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Memorial stood three feet below sea level; the models suggested that a major storm could bring twelve to fifteen feet of water around it. Yancovich’s hand-drawn measurements showed that less than four feet of street flooding could send water over the loading dock and into the hospital.

The generators themselves were elevated, but parts of the electrical distribution system were not. Yancovich warned that modest flooding could disable most of the medical center and predicted that patients might need to be moved to the newer Clara Wing. His department added floodgates and raised a vent for the underground diesel tanks, but proposed raising transfer switches and pumps remained unfunded: a partial electrical-work bid exceeded a quarter of a million dollars. The citywide effort to assess hospitals’ ability to withstand fifteen feet of water had likewise stalled over cost, leaving critical electrical equipment at ground level in all but two New Orleans hospitals.

The Hospital’s Failing Power

As floodwaters threatened Memorial, Yancovich and emergency committee head Susan Mulderick understood that evacuation might be necessary. The hospital’s backup system was only as strong as its most vulnerable components: although its generators were on the second floor, low-lying switches and other equipment could interrupt the power they produced. The danger was not merely theoretical. During the emergency, one generator shut down and part of the hospital went dark; maintenance workers, none of them generator mechanics, used flashlights to add water to its radiator and restart it.

The strain was prolonged. Memorial’s three teal-colored generators, each rated at 750 kilowatts, had been running for two days, although disaster plans expected them to support the hospital for at least three. Routine tests were brief, and the units had not been built for sustained operation. Their laboring engines became a measure of how precarious the hospital’s remaining infrastructure was, even before the later discovery of bodies made the cost of the crisis visible.

The Chapel and the Delayed Recovery

On September 6, cameraman Tony Zumbado paddled to Memorial and followed the smell of death to the Myron C. Madden Chapel. A small sheet of yellow lined paper, marked “DO NOT ENTER,” was taped to the wooden door. Inside, his camera recorded more than a dozen bodies on low cots and on the floor, covered in white sheets. The details the footage disclosed—a wisp of gray hair, a bent knee, a hand reaching across a blue gown—made the accumulated deaths impossible to treat as an abstraction.

The bodies remained at Memorial for days as officials disputed responsibility for recovering them. The chapel became a kind of wake, visited by National Guardsmen, contracted security guards, a reporter, and a relief worker overwhelmed by the stench. A chaplain who entered while searching for survivors later likened the scene to a picture of hell. On September 11, more than a week after the last living patients and staff had departed, a disaster mortuary team recovered forty-five bodies from the chapel, morgues, hallways, the LifeCare floor, and the emergency room.

Retrospective Significance

The date’s importance lies in the collision between warning and belated recognition. Memorial’s flood exposure and vulnerable electrical components had been assessed before Katrina, yet proposed improvements were left undone; during the crisis, the hospital’s limited power infrastructure had to sustain it well beyond the brief periods for which generators were routinely tested. By September 6, the chapel made the human aftermath visible, while the recovery operation itself remained delayed.

The book also places the deaths within a broader question about changing standards of care in disasters. Its retrospective analysis argues that saving more lives depends not only on triage rules but on reducing the need to compromise care and continually reassessing what resources are available. It identifies a particularly stark timing problem: the plan to inject patients went ahead just as helicopters arrived in force and expanded the available resources. In that account, September 6 belongs to a crisis in which infrastructure, evacuation, and changing rescue capacity did not align in time.