Employee-Owned Company Shines in Katrina's Wake

A lot of organizations didn't come out so well in the wake of Katrina, but 100% ESOP-owned Acadian Ambulance Services in Lafayette was universally acclaimed as heroic. Acadian had long been fanatic about emergency communications and, as a result, had the only reliable communications system in the entire region. Among a great deal of other favorable media coverage, CEO Richard Zuschlag was given honorable mention status by Inc. magazine (December 2005) for entrepreneur of the year. Acadian's 2,000 employees took immediate action after the hurricane. They built a makeshift helipad and set up an outdoor generator. In local hospitals, helicopters started ferrying sick infants in their incubators and healthy babies in whatever they could find that worked. Medics were stationed on the roofs of New Orleans hospitals to evacuate patients, staffed a first-aid station in the Superdome, and established a triage center on the highway. Acadian dispatchers oversaw the coordination of all the emergency aircraft (not just their own) in the area. Critically ill patients were duct-tapped to doors ripped off to allow emergency transportation to helicopters. The National Guard, seeing what Acadian was doing, put them in charge of all hospital rescues. There is a lot more to the story, with hundreds of individual acts of heroism. It's not unusual for Acadian, which transports 250,000 patients per year, getting reimbursed for only 45%. It is a story, though, that the employee ownership community can long relate with special pride.

To see a 13-minute video of interviews with Acadian's employees about Katrina, go to http://www.acadian.com/.