Boyd Loehr, a Denver nurse deployed to Louisiana as part of a health-care group, was beside himself with frustration.
The group’s rescue mission came days before the government gave the order to forcibly evacuate Hurricane Katrina survivors. The chaplain in the group tried to help Loehr understand why they refused to leave, that their tenuous grip on reality was linked with what remained of their houses.
Among the survivors: The couple who believed a boat would be coming tomorrow. The woman who refused to leave without her dog. The man struggling to stay afloat in chest-high, black water that stank like a cesspool.
“But the most frustrating feeling in my life came when we saw the family with the little girl,” remembers Loehr, 29, who works in the intensive-care unit at St. Joseph Hospital. He returned Wednesday from a week in Louisiana.
“I was there to help people, to rescue them. But even for the welfare of that child in danger, they would not leave. We couldn’t do anything but try to talk them into coming with us.”
Loehr, the chaplain, a surgeon and a military crew had all risked their lives to get to this devastated part of New Orleans. Their vehicles were perilously close to floating. All were prepared to give up their seats and wait for the vehicle to pick them up later if they needed the room to get a family out to safety.
“But nobody came back with us,” Loehr said. “I wanted to go barreling through there with a bullhorn, letting them all know this water could kill them even if the rest of what happened didn’t.”
The only thing that helped Loehr keep his composure was handing out fresh water and food to the holdouts.
“The people who wanted to leave were already gone,” Loehr said. “Those who remained didn’t believe the dangers still existed because they saw the hel icopters, the transport boats, the buses all around them every day.
“We probably just enabled them by giving them more supplies. But it was a lesser of two evils.”
