Tulane Hospital is depicted during Hurricane Katrina as a hospital cut off by darkness, heat, and surrounding water, but with an evacuation plan that helped keep panic at bay. Its experience provides a striking contrast in Susan Mulderick’s family’s accounts of the storm: while hospitals elsewhere faced failed transfers and patient deaths, a sister who worked at Tulane described an orderly, if slow, rescue arranged with private transportation—and knew of no patient deaths there.

Setting During the Flood

Tulane Hospital stood in downtown New Orleans. During the crisis it was dark and hot, with water surrounding it. Those conditions place the hospital within the same broad emergency confronting other New Orleans institutions, but the account emphasizes that Tulane’s evacuation unfolded differently from the more chaotic experiences recounted by Mulderick’s family.

Evacuation and Corporate Planning

Officials at Tulane’s parent corporation, HCA, had proactively arranged private helicopters and buses to evacuate patients, employees, and their families. They anticipated that government assets would not be sufficient. The evacuation was orderly, though slow, and that organization helped keep panic from taking hold. The account does not specify how many people were moved or the precise timetable; its emphasis is on advance arrangements and their effect on the evacuation.

Family Testimony and the Hospital’s Account

After returning to New Orleans, Mulderick and several siblings gathered in a backyard, drank wine, and took turns telling stories about their separate hospital experiences during the storm. The sister who had worked at Tulane could laugh and joke about what she had experienced, and she knew of no patients who had died there. Her recollection contrasts with another sister’s account of Chalmette Medical Center, where the first floor flooded to the ceiling and several patients died after a difficult evacuation. The family gathering makes Tulane’s experience part of a wider comparison among hospitals rather than an isolated account.

Tulane also commissioned a book about its Katrina experience, Leave No One Behind: Hurricane Katrina and the Rescue of Tulane Hospital. The account describes the book as praise-filled and notes that new HCA employees were sometimes given a copy. Read alongside the sister’s recollection, this institutional narrative presents Tulane’s evacuation as a planned rescue effort, while the family stories preserve the differences in how hospitals experienced the same disaster.