Medical Center Evacuates as Sandy Surges
New York, N.Y. — There are normal days in America. Days where we all go to work and different radio stations report different stories that they happen to find interesting. Then there are days like today, days when every news station is talking about the same events, days when the entire nation’s eyes are fixated on one topic.
Hurricane Sandy is one of those events that touches everyone’s lives, whether you’re on the east coast weathering the storm or sitting in an office building across the country anxiously watching your Facebook news feed to hear updates from friends who are in harms way. On Monday, Oct. 29, employees and patients at the New York University Langone Medical Center found themselves in the former category when the facility experienced an emergency evacuation.
The hospital’s basement began to flood around 7:45 Monday night, with reports indicating low points like the bottom floor and elevators filled with over 10 feet of water at one time. Soon the local electrical grid went out and every hospital administrator’s nightmare followed two hours later, when the backup power also failed.
The hospital’s staff sprung into action, beginning the long and arduous process of carefully evacuating 215 patients from a massive hospital. CBS’s Jonathan Pook indicated some patients, who were in no condition to walk, were placed in medical sleds and carried down the stairs by teams of four to five employees from as high up as the 17th floor.
The number of patients moved was significantly lower than it would have been had the hospital not discharged hundreds of patients in preparation for the storm. The normal capacity for the hospital is around 800 patients. The reporter added that nurses carrying some of the babies down nine flights of stairs from the neonatal intensive care units were forced to use manual respirator pumps to keep them breathing, with no other options during a complete power outage.
One thousand staff members participated in the evacuation with the aid of firefighters and police officers. Ambulances transferred each patient individually to nearby hospitals, which took responsibility for notifying family members of the location of each new admission. Despite the weather conditions, there wasn’t a shortage of ambulances, as a line of over 20 of them was waiting outside the building at all times. Patients were transferred to Lenox Hill, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Mount Sinai and New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospitals. The evacuation was completed slightly before noon on Tuesday, although all patients in intensive care units and other critical areas were already in another hospital hours beforehand.
Multiple hospitals throughout New York State experienced some level of evacuation during the storm, but none were on the scale of the event at Langone Medical Center.