NEW YORK — Evoking harrowing memories of Hurricane Katrina, 300 patients were evacuated floor by floor from a premier hospital that lost generator power at the height of superstorm Sandy.
Rescuers and staff at New York
University Langone Medical Center, some making 10 to 15 trips down
darkened stairwells, began their mission Monday night, the youngest and
sickest first, finishing about 15 hours later.
Among the first out were 20 babies in neonatal intensive care, some on battery-powered respirators.
“Everyone
here is a hero,” Dr. Bernard Birnbaum, a senior vice president at Tisch
Hospital, the flagship at the NYU medical complex, told exhausted crews
as he released all but essential employees late Tuesday morning. “Thank
you, thank you, thank you.”
More than two dozen ambulances from
around the city lined up around the lower Manhattan block near the East
River to transport the sick to Mount Sinai Hospital, the Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, St. Luke’s Hospital, New York
Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and Long Island Jewish
Hospital.
Margaret Chu, 36, of Manhattan, gave birth to a son, Cole, shortly before noon Monday.
“Then,
a couple of hours later, things got a little hairy. The electricity
started to flicker and the windows got shaky,” she said from LIJ’s Lenox
Hill, where she was transported after backup generators failed and NYU
was plunged into darkness.
Chu, accompanied by husband Gregory
Prata, was able to walk 13 flights into a waiting ambulance with help
from staff and first responders lighting the way by flashlight. She said
other women who had given birth during the storm were carried down on
sleigh-like gurneys.
“Everybody was pretty calm. I would call it organized chaos,” she said.
Meanwhile,
other New York hospitals canceled outpatient appointments and elective
surgeries. And several closed and evacuated patients, including New York
Downtown Hospital, a Manhattan campus of the VA New York Harbor
Healthcare System and other NYU-affiliated facilities. Coney Island
Hospital was evacuating Tuesday afternoon.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg
was clearly angry about the NYU Medical Center crisis when he addressed
reporters late Monday, saying hospital officials had assured the city
they had working backup power.
Last year, NYU evacuated in advance
of Hurricane Irene on the order of city officials, spokeswoman Allison
Clair said. “This year we were not told to evacuate by the city.”
Without
power, there are no elevators so patients — some of whom were being
treated for cancer and other serious illnesses — were carefully carried
down staircases. As the evacuation began, gusts of wind blew their
blankets while nurses and other staff huddled around the sick on
gurneys, some holding IVs and other equipment.
Luz Martinez, 42,
of Roosevelt Island off midtown Manhattan in the East River, was home
recuperating from a cesarean section when she got her first inkling that
her 3-week-old daughter was being transferred out of NYU’s neonatal
intensive care unit.
The baby, Emma, had been born prematurely.
Martinez had been calling the hospital for regular updates but at one
point Monday night, the phones were busy every time she called. Then she
heard Bloomberg on television talking about the evacuation and soon
after lost power at home.
“I went crazy. I wanted to come to the hospital,” Martinez said.
She
and her husband hopped in the car but could find no way into Manhattan
because of storm damage and bridge closings. That’s when NYU called her
on her cellphone to say Emma was being taken to Mount Sinai.
But
the terrified parents couldn’t get there, either. They called Mount
Sinai through the wee hours for regular updates and finally reached
their baby around noon Tuesday.
“It was a nightmare,” Martinez said by phone. “I’ve been doing a lot of crying.”
Emma
is doing fine. Martinez praised the staff at both hospitals. “They all
handled everything as smoothly as they could,” she said.
NYU sent
home about 100 of its 400 patients earlier Monday to lighten its load,
starting the evacuation of the remaining 300 patients at about 7:30 p.m.
when backup generators began to fail, Clair said. There were no
injuries during relocation.
The scene was reminiscent of hospital
evacuations in New Orleans after Katrina, with patients being carried
down stairs on stretchers because elevators were out, and nurses
squeezing oxygen bags for them because of lack of power to run breathing
machines.
The difference is that in New Orleans, patients were
trapped in flooded hospitals; in New York, dozens of ambulances could
get through to move patients to safety.
The hospital blamed the
severity of Sandy and the higher-than-expected storm surge that flooded
its basement but had little else to say beyond a short statement emailed
to reporters after the evacuation was complete.
“At this time, we
are focusing on assessing the full extent of the storm’s impact on all
of our patient care, research and education facilities,” the statement
said.
Most of the power outages in lower Manhattan, where the NYU
hospital complex is located, were due to an explosion at an electrical
substation, Consolidated Edison said. It wasn’t clear whether flooding
or flying debris caused the explosion, said John Miksad, senior vice
president for electric operations at Con Edison.
At NYU, sporadic
telephone service made it difficult for the hospital to notify relatives
where patients were taken. It relied instead on receiving hospitals to
notify families.
Until the generators failed, Chu considered
herself and her new baby out of harm’s way. By the time she was
evacuated, the streets were eerily silent and the night sky lit up by
emergency lights of waiting ambulances.
“My son will appreciate this someday,” she said.
