United States Coast Guard Auxiliary

During the Katrina crisis, the Coast Guard Auxiliary enters the account not as a fully described institution but through volunteers working to get rescue aircraft to Memorial Medical Center and its ventilator-dependent patients. Their efforts—relaying information, seeking receiving hospitals, and challenging an evacuation decision—show how rescue depended on coordination across organizations, and how that coordination could falter inside the hospital even when outside help was available.

Role in the Rescue Effort

At the Coast Guard emergency command center in Alexandria, Coast Guard Auxiliary volunteer Michael Richard worked beside Coast Guard officer Shelley Decker as she tried to send helicopters to Memorial for LifeCare Hospitals of New Orleans’ ventilator patients. Richard spoke by cell phone with a nurse leader on the helipad. The nurse appeared to be waving the approaching aircraft away, though she believed she was signaling them. Richard told her to stand clear when the helicopters arrived. The account presents this intervention as a practical attempt to correct a dangerous miscommunication, not as evidence that the volunteers controlled the hospital’s evacuation.

A separate call to Memorial’s fifth floor conveyed that three helicopters had been sent and that someone was waving them away. A nurse carried the phone to the command team, but a nursing director dismissed the caller as outside the hospital’s evacuation plan and instructed the nurse not to bring the phone down again. The exchange shows the limits of the Auxiliary volunteer’s access: information about rescue aircraft could reach the hospital, yet hospital leaders could still reject the channel through which it arrived.

Advocacy for the Most Critical Patients

As Memorial’s generators failed, Richard had spent hours finding hospitals willing to receive patients and trying to persuade hospital leaders to allow rescues to proceed. He was particularly troubled by a leader’s stated priority to evacuate Memorial’s own patients before the critically ill LifeCare patients, who belonged to another company and were expected to die. Richard challenged the decision and insisted that the most critical patients should go first. He believed the leader would later be burdened by the consequences of leaving them behind, and his Christian upbringing informed his conviction that those most in need deserved care.

The disagreement was not simply about the availability of helicopters. Rescue crews had limited flying time, the patients required continuous ventilation, and moving them up and down the stairs in darkness demanded staff and effort. Memorial nurses told Decker that operations had to pause until morning; Richard, who had worked to secure hospitals and rescue capacity, opposed stopping the effort. His intervention makes visible the conflict between an outside volunteer’s insistence on the sickest patients’ urgent claim to rescue and the hospital leaders’ control over access to their patients.

Limits and Significance

The account does not establish that Richard could compel the hospital to act, nor does it attribute the eventual rescue outcome to the Auxiliary alone. It instead shows a volunteer pressing for action amid fragmented communications and divided authority. His work depended on cooperation from hospital leaders, while the hospital’s internal decisions could frustrate rescue efforts that had been arranged from outside.

The Auxiliary’s significance here lies in this narrow but consequential role: its volunteers helped carry rescue information into a failing hospital response and argued that the patients most dependent on others should not be pushed to the back of the line. The narrative sets their efforts against a wider breakdown in coordination, where aircraft, receiving hospitals, and willing advocates existed, but getting them to the patients depended on decisions made inside Memorial.