Hurricane Katrina Remembered

This article originally appeared in the November 2005 issue of EMS World Magazine.

“You’d be amazed how small a motel room gets,” says Don Lundy, “when there are 15 people inside fighting.”

Hurricane Katrina had barely passed when the melee erupted. It was over a piece of bread, and before it was quelled, a pregnant woman had been roughed up.

The tragedy in New Orleans brought out the worst in some people, but the best in others. Lundy, an EMS director from South Carolina, saw both as he rode out the storm with a group of 150 in a SpringHill Suites motel.

Most of them endured with grace, but a few rabble-rousers acted out. They were quickly disposed of: An impromptu security force, formed from among the group, kicked them out of the motel.

“I didn’t know where they were going, and I didn’t care,” says Lundy. “It had stopped raining, and we had 135 people left we didn’t want to endanger.”

For Lundy, in New Orleans for the NAEMT annual meeting, the ordeal began the day before. After assuring him on Saturday that he’d be able to fly out as scheduled on Sunday, Delta then canceled all flights in and out of the city, leaving Lundy and colleague Cliff Parker stranded.

The men and their wives turned to Rodney Davis, general manager of the Courtyard Marriott, where they were staying. They decided to take refuge in the adjoining SpringHill, a Marriott property shielded by a double brick wall. A few remaining guests and a number of hotel workers settled in to wait out the storm.

Despite the brawl and three expectant mothers in the group—“Three pregnant women and a storm pressure below 900 millibars… It makes my eyes bleed just to think about it,” Lundy says—medical issues were minimal. Getting out of the city once the storm passed, though, was another story.

When the rain and wind stopped Monday, a quick reconnaissance of the surrounding area revealed significant damage, but no flooding. The EMSers hatched an escape plan: A friend of Lundy’s lived in New Orleans, and his wife worked at the VA. If they could get to the VA, they could pick up her car, take it out of the city and return it later. It was too dangerous to try it Monday night, they decided, but by Tuesday morning, they’d be out.

But Tuesday brought a different reality: Downtown was filling with water. They navigated to the VA and found the garage entrance blocked by water that was rising so fast you could see it—water with bodies floating in it. “At that point,” says Lundy, “I started to worry.”

Back at the SpringHill, Davis knew of another vehicle: A rental car at a nearby hotel used for visiting businessmen. Finding a single working phone line, Lundy called the car company’s corporate headquarters in Texas.

“I spoke to somebody high up,” he recalls, “and I told them, ‘Look, there’s a car here. I don’t know who it’s rented to, but it’s going to be underwater in a few hours, and I’d like to take it.’ I spent about 45 minutes on the phone. On toward the end, I said, ‘Listen, I don’t know how to say this, but I am going to take this car when I hang up. I’d like your permission. I don’t want to get arrested, but I’m going to take this car. How do we make this happen?’” The car company finally acceded, took Lundy’s information and gave him their blessing.

With that, the men and their wives escaped on one of the few remaining routes out of town, not stopping for more than 300 miles.

It was a harrowing ordeal, Lundy says, but one that ultimately reinforced the notion that people are basically good.

“People focus on the looters and all the bad things,” he says, “but there are a lot of good people in New Orleans—a lot who helped us and helped each other. All of our group, with the exception of a few, really looked out for one another. Everybody helped make sure everybody else was safe. There were a lot of great people there.”