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| In this Oct. 29, 2012, file photo, medical workers assist a patient into an ambulance during an evacuation of NYU Langone Medical Center Monday evening during Superstorm Sandy. Two of the city’s busiest, most important medical centers failed the simplest test of disaster-readiness during superstorm Sandy this week. They lost power. Their backup generators failed, or proved inadequate. Nearly 1,000 patients had to be evacuated. |
NEW YORK (AP) -- There are few places in the U.S. where hospitals have put as much thought and money into disaster planning as New York. And yet two of the city's busiest, most important medical centers failed a fundamental test of readiness during Superstorm Sandy this week: They lost power.
Their backup generators failed, or proved inadequate. Nearly 1,000 patients had to be evacuated.
The
closures led to dramatic scenes of doctors carrying patients down dark
stairwells, nurses operating respirators by hand, and a bucket brigade
of National Guard troops hauling fuel to rooftop generators in a vain
attempt to keep the electricity on.
Both
hospitals, NYU Langone Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital Center, were
still trying to figure out exactly what led to the power failures
Thursday, but the culprit appeared to be the most common type of flood
damage there is: water in the basement.
While
both hospitals put their generators on high floors where they could be
protected in a flood, other critical components of the backup power
system, such as fuel pumps and tanks, remained in basements just a block
from the East River.
Both hospitals had
fortified that equipment against floods within the past few years, but
the water - which rushed with tremendous force - found a way in.
"This
reveals to me that we have to be much more imaginative and
detail-oriented in our planning to make sure hospitals are as resilient
as they need to be," said Irwin Redlener, director of the National
Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School
of Public Health.
The problem of unreliable backup electricity at hospitals is nothing new.
Over
the first six months of the year, 23 percent of the hospitals inspected
by the Joint Commission, a health care facility accreditation group,
were found to be out of compliance with standards for backup power and
lighting, according to a spokesman.
Power
failures crippled New Orleans hospitals after Hurricane Katrina. The
backup generator failed at a hospital in Stafford Springs, Conn., after
the remnants of Hurricane Irene blew through the state in 2011.
Hospitals in Houston were crippled when Tropical Storm Allison flooded
their basements and knocked out electrical equipment in 2001.
When
the Northeast was hit with a crippling blackout in 2003, the backup
power at several of New York City's hospitals failed or performed
poorly. Generators malfunctioned or overheated. Fuel ran out too
quickly. Even where the backup systems worked, they provided electricity
to only some parts of the hospital and left others in the dark.
Afterward,
a mayoral task force recommended upgrading testing standards for
generators and requiring backup plans for blood banks and health care
facilities that provide dialysis treatment.
Alan
Aviles, president of New York City's Health and Hospitals Corp., which
operates Bellevue, said that after a scare last summer when Hurricane
Irene threatened to cause flooding, Bellevue put its basement-level fuel
pumps in flood-resistant chambers.
It still
isn't clear whether water breached those defenses, but when an estimated
17 million gallons of water rushed through loading docks and into the
hospital's 1-million-square-foot basement, the fuel feed to the
generators stopped working. The floodwaters also knocked out the
hospital's elevators.
For two days, National
Guardsmen carried fuel to the generators, but conditions inside the
hospital for patients and staff deteriorated anyway. The generators were
designed to supply only 30 percent of the usual electrical load at the
hospital, leaving a lot of equipment and labs hobbled. The hospital also
lost all water pressure on Tuesday. Nearly 700 patients had been
evacuated by Thursday afternoon.
"The precautions we had taken to date had served us well," Aviles said. "But Mother Nature can always up the stakes."
NYU Langone Medical Center had also tried to armor itself against floods.
All
seven of the generators providing backup power to the parts of the
hospital involved in patient care are only a few years old and are on
higher floors. The fuel tank is in a watertight vault. New fuel pumps
were installed just this year in a pump house upgraded to withstand a
high flood, said the hospital's vice president of facilities operation,
Richard Cohen.
"The medical center invested quite a bit of money to upgrade the facility," he said.
The
pump house remained "bone dry," Cohen said. But water shoved aside
plastic and plywood defenses and infiltrated the fuel vault, where
sensors detected the potentially damaging liquid and shut the generators
down. "The force of the surge that came in was unbelievable. It
dislodged our additional protection and caused a breach of the vault as
well," Cohen said.
The power at NYU went out in a flash, leaving the staff scrambling to evacuate 300 patients with no notice.
Dr.
Robert Berg, an obstetrician, said that when he lost power in his
apartment, he went to the hospital to charge his cellphone and was
stunned to find it in chaos.
"It didn't really
occur to me that the hospital was going to be in trouble," he said.
Even after finding the lobby dark, "I thought, `We'll have power
upstairs. We're an operating room.'"
He wound up carrying two patients down flights of stairs on a "med sled."
"There was a Category 1 outside and a Category 4 inside," he said. "I can't say that they were very well prepared for it."
That
has left only one hospital, Beth Israel Medical Center, functioning in
the southern third of Manhattan. It is also on backup power, but brought
in two huge new generators Thursday, just in case.
Aviles
said Bellevue might be out of commission for at least two more weeks.
NYU Langone's generators are operating again, but the hospital is
waiting for Consolidated Edison to restore its power before it starts
taking patients again. That could happen in a matter of days.
Flooding
may pose less of a danger to the hospital's power supply in the future.
Construction is under way on a new power plant, at a cost of more than
$200 million, that will run on natural gas and supply all the hospital's
power needs.
"It's a tremendous facility, with a lot of hardening built into it," Cohen said.
