Dr. Charles L. McGarvey was the Team Leader for the Public Health Services (PHS) deployment team (Alpha Team) and coordinated services for evacuees at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center (PMAC) on the campus of LSU in Baton Rouge. At that time, he was a Captain in the US PSU with a clinical position at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He describes the successes experienced in providing triage and stabilization for over 16,000 individuals over a 9-day period and the support he received from LSU and other local resources in the process:

"The PMAC Field Hospital was designed as a triage activity so evacuees could be assessed and receive necessary medical care someplace else. . . I think there was tremendous co-operation and co-ordination through the Director there at Louisiana State Department of Health & Hospitals. There was tremendous support from the university itself in the provision of the facilities to conduct this type of activity which was very, very critical. The utilization of the PMAC for this operation was ideal. We had good space, power, lighting, and water. We needed dry erase boards to begin to write up the schedules of the healthcare providers and also identify who the providers were and what function they served, so we established teams. The university was very quick to provide us the type of equipment needed to coordinate these logistics. We needed better communication because it was very noisy. I don’t know where the walkie-talkies came from, but we ended up with walkie-talkies so that we could talk from one end of the floor to the other."

"Food and water was a major issue to keep the healthcare providers well nourished and well hydrated in order to continue with their activities. That was supplied by a number of volunteer and church groups in and around that area. Between the university, the volunteers from the university and the community/church groups, much was provided to support the health care providers. That level of support made a major difference in facilitating a robust operation of healthcare providers to be able to work the very long eight-twelve-hour shifts, depending on their individual discipline."

"It was a little bit hectic to be able to keep control of everyone’s schedule and that’s why, for example, the dry erase boards were so critical. The other thing that we did on a regular basis was to hold operational meetings every eight hours between the shifts to update our groups and our professionals on what was happening because things were changing almost on the hour in terms of the numbers of people we would receive or what other needs were beginning to surface. For example, not only were we overseeing the PMAC but also the field being used to transition people after they had gone through the PMAC so that they could have a resting place before being discharged to either another hospital or to a nursing facility if they needed that level of care, or simply discharged to some place in the community."

"We really had two major operations there, both the field house and the PMAC. Over time we were directed to go out to some of the parishes that had been damaged by the storm to supplement some of the local hospitals and community healthcare facilities in the different parishes. A number of our officers actually were transported by helicopter from the PMAC during that same nine day period to assist in the lower parishes."