The belief in hospitals as sanctuaries

The belief in hospitals as sanctuaries is the expectation that a hospital will provide protection when a disaster makes homes and ordinary public spaces unsafe. At Memorial Medical Center, this was not an abstract ideal: generations of staff, patients, and families had treated the hospital as a place to ride out hurricanes. The history that made the refuge credible also revealed its limits. Floodwater had entered the hospital long before Hurricane Katrina, while the hospital’s own routines and public reputation encouraged confidence that it would endure.

A refuge built by repetition

For many New Orleanians, Memorial Medical Center was still known as Baptist, its name from its years as Southern Baptist Hospital. When hurricanes threatened, people arrived with relatives, children, pets, food, and supplies, including people who were not scheduled to work. Doctors sometimes admitted vulnerable outpatients because the hospital seemed safer than their homes. After the storm, people expected to clear debris and return home. The repeated pattern made the hospital feel less like a building exposed to weather than a dependable shelter within it.

That confidence had a long institutional history. For nearly eighty years, the brick-and-stone hospital near Claiborne and Napoleon Avenues had survived storms that damaged the city. During Hurricane Betsy in 1965, more than a thousand people took shelter there. The hospital’s earlier account of its performance, and its readiness during Hurricane Ivan the year before Katrina, fed a durable sense of security. Nurse Cathy Green expressed the belief in stark terms to her daughter: if Baptist failed, the whole city would be in danger. The hospital’s reliability had become a measure of the city’s own safety.

The sanctuary ideal was also complicated by the institution’s origins and limits. Southern Baptist Hospital opened in 1926 amid declarations of ambitious purpose and a public presentation of modern comfort. Yet charity care required a poor family to obtain a church letter attesting to need and promising a donation, and the institution initially restricted assistance largely to widows, orphans, and older people. Its missionary work also advanced the profile of white Baptists in a city where they were a minority and where the denomination had a history of supporting racial segregation. The hospital could be imagined as a refuge, but access to its charity was not unconditional or socially neutral.

Floodwater beneath the promise

The hospital’s first major flood came less than two months after it opened. A severe storm brought nearly six inches of rain in its first four hours. Drainage catch basins clogged, water rose through the streets, and floodwater poured into the hospital basement, submerging records, food, drugs, instruments, linens, the stove, and dining-room tables. The lights remained on, but the elevators stopped. Staff and doctors waded through the water to retrieve supplies, while visitors and nurses were stranded overnight and could not reach loved ones by phone. Fire crews eventually pumped out the basement; the hospital then improvised meals and worked to resume service.

The crisis was not simply an exceptional encounter with weather. New Orleans lay low, and its drainage system depended on pumps to move water toward surrounding lakes. Development had paved over ground that once absorbed rainfall, while planned improvements beneath the city lagged behind construction above it. In 1926, the hospital’s drainage area depended on a single pumping station, and the storm overwhelmed the system despite an extraordinary effort to expel water. The flooding around Baptist was especially deep and persistent: water rose six feet along Napoleon Avenue, and the hospital basement filled to eight feet. The same building that represented refuge was embedded in a vulnerable landscape.

The vulnerability persisted even after drainage capacity increased over subsequent decades. In the Freret neighborhood, workers knew that a moderate storm could flood the streets near Memorial. Staff adapted by parking on raised neutral ground, wearing waders, and using a battered metal fishing boat kept in the parking garage basement to reach work. Yet food, equipment, records, and linens continued to be stored in the basement, and many employees had stopped treating water as a serious threat. Familiarity with recurring floods could sustain practical improvisation while also dulling the sense of danger.

Katrina and the temporary reprieve

As Katrina approached, forecasts warned that the storm could strengthen to a catastrophic level. The threat was especially immediate for LifeCare’s patients in Chalmette, in St. Bernard Parish, where memories of earlier levee failures and flooding contributed to unease. The decision whether to move very sick patients involved a real conflict: transporting them for a false alarm also carried risk, while accurate forecasts could leave the facility underwater. The sanctuary idea did not remove that dilemma; it made the question of which place could be trusted more urgent.

After Katrina moved ashore and weakened, water outside Memorial stabilized and then receded. Staff cleaned floors, checked damage, and returned pets and food downstairs. By evening, it was possible to walk dogs outside. The hospital remained functional on backup power, and people said that the city had dodged a bullet. This apparent survival echoed the older pattern of weathering a storm and resuming ordinary life. But it was a reprieve, not proof that the hospital could shelter everyone through the disaster that followed. The story’s reversal lies in the distance between surviving the initial storm and being able to protect patients amid the wider emergency.

A sanctuary surrounded by crisis

As flooding and rescue problems continued beyond the hospital, people outside Memorial sought shelter there. A stabbing victim reached the emergency ramp through water and needed air evacuation. Helicopters visible at the hospital drew others toward it, and families arrived by boat seeking food and help. Hospital personnel secured entrances and planned to give the families food while directing them elsewhere, including toward the Superdome, even as radio reports described conditions there as dire. The hospital’s role as a refuge met the practical limits of space, security, transport, and a strained evacuation effort.

The information reaching staff and the public further unsettled judgments about safety. WWL Radio repeatedly carried an announcement that martial law had been declared, although it had not. Reports of looting and violence circulated alongside accounts of people trapped by floodwater. One caller, Freddy, described being in an attic in the Gentilly neighborhood, surrounded by about nine feet of water with four other people, including a baby; they had tried for hours to signal a helicopter. Such reports made the world beyond the hospital seem dangerous, but they also showed that people were stranded and in need of rescue. Rumor could intensify fear precisely when reliable situational knowledge was most necessary.

From refuge to contested symbol

The belief in hospitals as sanctuaries gives the history of Memorial Medical Center its central tension. The institution had repeatedly served as a gathering place during hurricanes, and its record made trust understandable. Yet the 1926 flood, the recurring water around the Freret neighborhood, and the later limits on admitting and evacuating people showed that a hospital could not stand apart from the city’s infrastructure or emergency response. It was both a protected interior and a vulnerable part of a larger system.

After the crisis, the hospital’s sanctuary image also became contested in public coverage of patient deaths. CNN repeatedly framed the case through the figure of an alleged angel of death, while an expert’s attempt to describe the power loss, fear, and delayed rescue that preceded the injections was cut short. This coverage displaced the conditions surrounding the hospital with a sensational question about individual wrongdoing. The contrast matters to the motif: treating a hospital as an unquestioned sanctuary can obscure its material failures, but treating it only as a scene of alleged crime can erase the disaster context in which its promise of protection broke down. The book returns to that gap between the place people trusted and the shelter the emergency could actually provide.