United States Navy

The US Navy enters the Memorial Medical Center crisis less as a visible rescuer than as a distant institution to which hospital executives appealed when the evacuation effort had no clear center of responsibility. Tenet officials sought Navy assistance for patients and people sheltering at Memorial, but the account records the appeals and the disjointed channels around them—not a Navy-led evacuation of the hospital.

A rescue effort without a clear command

As floodwaters threatened Memorial, Susan Mulderick told a hastily assembled command meeting that the hospital had to act before its power failed. Nearly two hundred patients needed evacuation, including people dependent on life support, newborns, high-risk pregnant patients, dialysis patients, and bone-marrow-transplant patients vulnerable to infection. The hospital’s emergency plans had not produced a coordinated response to this crisis; Memorial staff were trying to obtain help from multiple organizations as the situation worsened.

Tenet executives likewise struggled to identify who could authorize or organize a rescue. Appeals moved among elected officials, government agencies, hospital associations, and emergency-management bodies, with each party often redirecting the request elsewhere. Separate priority lists ranked Memorial inconsistently, while federal, state, and local communications systems could not reliably share information. In this setting, the Navy became one more potential source of assistance—and one more endpoint in a chain whose participants lacked a common picture of the emergency.

Appeals to Navy officials

Tenet executive Michael Arvin told Bob Smith about an offer of help from an air-logistics company based near Dallas. Smith urged him to call. At the same time, Tenet executives were trying to raise Memorial’s priority with government officials. An intermediary offered to appeal to Governor Kathleen Blanco and federal health officials, who in turn directed Tenet toward hospital associations and other agencies. Ross Perot, whose son was a Tenet contractor, appealed to both the Coast Guard and the Navy.

The corporate effort also produced a direct, anxious appeal. In an email to a California contact, Arvin described Tenet as receiving a runaround from local Coast Guard and Navy channels and asked for help from an admiral she knew. Her reply was that the admiral had retired. The exchange captures the gap between the urgency inside the hospital and the uncertain usefulness of the contacts available to Tenet: even a request aimed at a senior military figure could lead nowhere because the contact was no longer in office.

Tenet’s requests were not limited to transporting its own patients. In seeking flight clearances for privately arranged helicopters, planners told officials that the operation would also move hundreds of community members who had taken refuge at Memorial. A Tenet vice president separately described the need to get local residents out by boat. These competing needs—hospital patients, staff, and civilians sheltering inside—complicated efforts to explain what kind of help was required and from whom.

The September 1 message

On the morning of September 1, 2005, Bob Smith sent an email to Captain John Andrews of the Navy Second Fleet, identifying Memorial’s address and presenting the situation as an immediate security emergency. Smith reported that the facility was unsecured, that gunfire in the area was preventing the evacuation of patients and staff, that people with weapons were in or around the building, and that people were dying inside. The message shows how Tenet framed its appeal to a Navy officer: not simply as a request to move patients, but as a claim that the hospital itself was compromised and lives were in immediate danger.

That account must be distinguished from evidence that the Navy acted on it. A state emergency-medical-services call log later that morning recorded that sixty patients at Memorial needed to be moved by stretcher, but the book does not connect that entry to a Navy operation. Nor does it describe Navy personnel evacuating the hospital. Tenet’s messages establish the company’s alarm and its attempt to secure military assistance; they do not, by themselves, establish the accuracy of every security claim or the outcome of the appeal.

What the Navy’s appearance reveals

The Navy’s role in the narrative is therefore defined by an attempted connection across a fractured emergency response. Tenet’s executives appealed to military authorities while separate agencies maintained conflicting priorities and communications systems failed to interoperate. The company’s messages conveyed escalating alarm, but the rescue effort that the account traces also depended on other channels, including privately hired helicopters. Navy assistance was sought, yet the evidence presented here leaves its response to Memorial unresolved.

That distinction matters in a story where the need for evacuation was concrete and immediate, while authority and information were dispersed. The US Navy appears in the record as a possible source of capacity whom corporate officials tried to reach, not as the institution shown carrying patients to safety. The gap between appeal and documented action mirrors the larger coordination failure surrounding Memorial: urgent requests could be sent, redirected, or framed as priorities without producing a single, shared account of who would rescue whom.