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Sunday, May 21, 2006
CHAPTER 16: AN EXODUS IN SLOW MOTION
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Multimedia
New Orleans — Nerves frayed as the city slipped toward anarchy. By Thursday afternoon, Sept. 1, it felt to Mel Lagarde as though security around Tulane Hospital was breaking down.
Gunfire could be heard on the streets. There were reports from law enforcement that gangs were targeting hospitals. He had to protect his people.
As a division president for Tulane’s corporate owner, the Hospital Corporation of America, Lagarde was responsible for the hundreds of people still inside the hospital. Tulane had requested security from the state command post in Baton Rouge, but there was no sign of the National Guard.
That night, Lagarde made the decision to move everyone out of the hospital and into Tulane’s Saratoga Street parking garage. With fewer entrances and exits to secure, Tulane guards would have an easier time protecting them. Since Tuesday, the garage roof had served as a landing zone for helicopters. The floors below were a staging area, so patients and staff could move quickly to the rooftop once a chopper landed.
But moving everyone into the garage was risky. Pulling the security force out of the interior of the hospital meant they would no longer be able to prevent people from breaking in. They would need to seal the doors back into the hospital, and that would cut off further access to supplies.
Lagarde knew this was a point of no return, and he struggled with the decision. If he moved everyone to the garage and they weren’t airlifted out soon, he worried he would begin to lose control. He also feared he would start losing patients because of the heat. Yet through it all, he remained calm. His faith kept him focused.
Lagarde had risen fast and early as a corporate executive. But it was his faith, as much as his business success, that defined him. The Catholic Church was central to his life, as it was to his wife, parents, grandparents and siblings.
In his early 20s, just as he was about to launch his career, Lagarde felt his faith had not matured. He knew little more about religion than he’d learned in catechism school. In pursuing a deeper faith, he regained a quiet commitment that hadn’t waned. It was a part of Lagarde, a self-effacing man, that not everyone knew.
In the past five years, he had become friends with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. The two were charter members of the city’s chapter of Legatus, an international Catholic organization that brings together CEOs and other executives to discuss how they can live out their faith in their professions. Lagarde rose to president of that, too.
He may have seen himself as a behind-the-scenes guy. But he was comfortable as a leader. In the midst of crisis, his confidence inspired those around him.
Lagarde knew Tulane’s helicopter rescue needed to move faster. Feeding Charity Hospital patients into the evacuation had slowed it down. Intermittent fog, rain and lightning — as well as shooting — had also interrupted the flow. And now there were problems at the airport.
Earlier, HCA had set up a staging area at Louis Armstrong International Airport. Lagarde, a member of the New Orleans Aviation Board, had pulled some strings by calling the airport’s executive director. But Thursday, as HCA’s copters dropped off evacuees, officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency commandeered a number of their medevacs. The day before they had grabbed four.
Lagarde put an end to it. The next time a government official tries to take one of our choppers, he told a Tulane executive stationed at the airport, tell him this: I’m sorry, but you can’t do that. This aircraft has already been commandeered by someone else.
It worked.
By Thursday afternoon, though, HCA executives in Nashville had made the decision to abandon the airport as a staging area for their patients. Others had begun to use it as a makeshift hospital and triage center, and conditions were deteriorating. Hundreds of sick, moaning people lay on the floor or on baggage conveyor belts. Many were elderly, alone and confused. There weren’t enough doctors, nurses or security officers. Intravenous bags were empty. Feces were smeared on the floor. Generator-powered fans made it cold, yet some patients were naked.
HCA felt the situation was dangerous. Instead of evacuating patients to the airport, then moving them by ground, it would fly them to an HCA hospital in Covington, La.
Wherever the helicopters would fly, however, they couldn’t get everyone out quickly enough; most could carry only one or two people at a time.
Lagarde began to focus on the big beautiful bird he saw for the first time flying overhead. It was a military chopper, a Chinook, and it could carry up to 40 seated passengers and 12 patients on stretchers.
If only they could get the attention of the military.
Police Cmdr. Dan Bitton had been flying Tulane rescue missions since Wednesday night. He, too, was concerned that the operation was too slow. His aircraft was not equipped for stretcher patients, only those who could sit up. And it could take only four to seven at a time, depending on their weight.
Bitton, a commander with the Winthrop Harbor Police Department north of Chicago, had no affiliation with HCA or Tulane. But he had served in Vietnam in the Army, and he didn’t hesitate to use his military contacts.
On Thursday, without authorization, Bitton landed his chopper at Eagle Base, the military command post at the Superdome, where he told the officer in charge that the situation at Tulane was urgent. There were Charity patients being kept alive by nurses who had been manually ventilating them for days. Hundreds of Tulane employees and their families were also trapped. The military needed to dedicate two Chinooks and two Black Hawks to Tulane. Now.
The military officer may not have appreciated Bitton’s directness, but he turned to an aide.
Can you get the commander the helicopters? he said.
Yes, sir.
The officer told Bitton he could expect his Chinook on the roof of the Tulane garage at 1700 hours — 5 p.m.
But how would they land it?
At HCA headquarters in Nashville, the design and construction staff had tried to calculate whether the rooftop could support a 55,000-pound machine that stretched 99 feet from rotor tip to rotor tip.
Bitton knew it would be a difficult approach. The pilots would have to clear the concrete lip around the top of the garage, then rest only enough of the aircraft’s weight on the ground to stabilize the chopper. The back wheels would go down, the front wheels barely touching. It was a huge risk. He discussed the landing at length with the officer and told him to let the crew know he would wave them off if he felt it wasn’t safe.
As 5 p.m. approached, Bitton, back at Tulane, started looking at his watch. He’d gone out on a limb, assuring the doctors from both hospitals that the Chinook would be there. Lagarde was waiting on the roof, in communication by phone with HCA headquarters. He worried about the patients underneath. What if concrete fell on them?
At 5:01, a huge helicopter came up over the buildings, like the extraterrestrial spaceship that arrived to rescue E.T. What a beautiful thing, Bitton thought to himself. Now it would be “kick ass” moving people out.
As the Chinook landed, the rooftop shuddered even under the partial weight of the giant chopper. The crowd in the garage erupted into cheers. HCA executives, who were huddled around a speakerphone in their boardroom, could hear the vibrating rumble of the Chinook all the way back in Nashville. They too broke out in applause.
