On Saturday, Aug. 27, 2005 — two days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall — LSU anounced classes would be canceled Monday.
Then-LSU Chancellor Sean O’Keefe, LSUPD, student affairs representatives and members of Student Governmenthat ridden out similar storms, such as Hurricane Dennis, a little more than a month before. But when floodwaters took the Gulf Coast early Monday morning, it became clear the storm was a force of its own.
Classes finally resumed the following Tuesday, 10 days after the initial announcement.
This meeting was first of many that turned campus into a small city. Resources came from every corner of the LSU community to treat trauma and special needs patients, house refugees and volunteers and give Baton Rouge and New Orleans residents by-the-minute updates.
Already designated a Special Needs Shelter by the Department of Health and Hospitals, LSU opened the Carl Maddox Field House three days before the storm as a refuge for medically dependent evacuees to find care and seek shelter.
The state Department of Social Services and the DHH began working with early evacuees Friday, readying the field house for its capacity of 250 during the height of the storm.
As marine helicopters landed in the Bernie Moore Track Stadium carrying countless wounded and traumatized, the PMAC was commissioned as a 24-hour acute care center.
The PMAC and field house combined designated 800 beds for a field hospital, which would eventually serve approximately 6,000 patients.
Campus Volunteers
Baton Rouge was the closest city to New Orleans many could reach in Katrina’s wake, and it soon became a hub for volunteers not only from Louisiana but across the country. As more people crowded campus, LSU made use of the willing workforce at its disposal — thousands of students holed up in residence halls, eager to help their Crescent City neighbors.
Then-SG President Michelle Gieg said she remembers wondering where all the “real adults” were as thousands of outsiders descended upon campus.
Gieg ran a call center out of the Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs. Typically used as a marketing research tool, it was commissioned as a place for volunteers to call in and receive shift assignments at the PMAC and field house.
“When you are talking about mapping an acute care facility, what you don’t want is a hundred people showing up at 9 a.m. one morning, and then have nobody show up at 2 a.m.,” Gieg said.
Between 20 and 30 students manned the call center from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., scheduling around-the-clock volunteer shifts.
“We would schedule them for four to six-hour shifts,” Gieg said. “We had to get something like a volunteer staff of 40 to 60 people 24 hours a day.”
The call center answered nearly 7,000 callers, but not all volunteers wanted to sign on for shifts.
Everyone who wanted to help, did their part no matter how big or small. As more people came to campus, the tiny pieces started to move and work together.
The theatre department offered up curtains and rods to ensure patient privacy, Gieg said. Elementary education majors babysat children who evacuated with or without their parents, said Scott Sternberg, then-editor-in-chief of The Daily Reveille.
The School of Veterinary Medicine and the AgCenter transformed the John M. Parker Coliseum into an animal shelter that housed more than 2,000 animals for more than a month following the storm.
Other volunteers served food and assisted with basic medical care.
Gieg said there were good Samaritans headed to Baton Rouge with truckloads of donated mattresses and doctors arriving at the airport who wanted to help with no idea where to go.
Student volunteers reunited owners with their pets,
operated a shuttle from the school to the airport and found homes in churches for 500 mattresses — and people to fill them.
While residence halls, on-campus apartments and Greek houses became temporary homes for family members and other evacuees, LSU opened its arms to more than the displaced.
Volunteers from across the U.S. needed a place to live.
LSU commissioned on-campus churches and reactivated two unused residence halls to fill the need.
LSU Dining fed thousands for more than a week, while LSUPD worked overtime ensuring the safety of permanent residents and refugees.
The Students
Many of the displaced students from the University of New Orleans, Tulane University and Loyola University New Orleans ended up staying.
“They didn’t want to lose a whole semester of college, and our registrar’s office worked around the clock to register hundreds of students who were planning to attend,” said Assistant Vice President for Communications Kristine Calongne Sanders, who worked as the director of media relations during Katrina.
The University waived late fees, matched tuition prices and found housing for displaced students, and it was those stories The Daily Reveille began to focus on, Sternberg said.
“The main thing for us was covering the influx of people. We had a real hyper-focus on the evacuees, the students from other universities that came to LSU,” Sternberg said. “People from Tulane are coming to LSU and registering for classes, but they don’t have any room in the classes, so what are they going to do?”
JOB WELL DONE
LSU received widespread praise for efficiently mobilizing resources as floodwaters receded and evacuees left campus two weeks later.
Sternberg, Gieg and Sanders said O’Keefe thrived in the intensely stressful environment and kept steady control over LSU during the storm.
“Everybody was just looking at their assets and seeing the need and figuring out what they could offer,” said then-Governor Kathleen Blanco.
Blanco called her daughter Nicole, who volunteered as a social worker for mentally distraught evacuees in the PMAC, a “direct line” into LSU
operations.
“I knew the PMAC operation was very big and going strong, so I thought the LSU people did a really great job,” Blanco said.
Looking back, Gieg said she is proud of the way LSU
responded to the crisis.
“I think in times like that you can either have open arms and cut some of the red tape in a bureaucracy, or you don’t,” Gieg said. “That’s not always the best business decision, to be honest, so I think the university handled it very well.”
The November after Katrina, LSU Media Relations released a book, “LSU in the Eye of the Storm: A University Model for Disaster Relief,” detailing the day-by-day operations before, during and after the storm.
Sanders said the storm defined LSU’s role in future natural disasters. The university solidified agreements between state and federal agencies, and the PMAC and field house are both designated Special Needs Facilities.
“That service piece of our mission is part of being a flagship university,” Sanders said. “That’s part of what we do.”