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After Sandy, NY hospital generators fail just like New Orleans
Floodwaters still filled tunnels and power outages remained for much of lower Manhattan as recriminations began on why hundreds of patients had to be shuttled from one of the city's premier hospitals while a massive superstorm passed overhead Monday night.NYU Langone Medical Center, which has a 786-bed campus on First Avenue, evacuated nearly 300 patients Monday night after the hospital's backup power generator failed. Ironically, big donor and the Medical Center's namesake, Kenneth Langone, was among the evacuees. But Gary Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs and a trustee at NYU Langone, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV that hospital officials are aware of shortcomings in their infrastructure. I am acutely aware that the infrastructure at NYU is somewhat old, he said. We do have backup generation facilities. They are not state-of-the-art, they're not in the most state-of-the-art location. That's all very, very well-known by the board of directors of NYU. Goldman Sachs, the fifth-biggest U.S. bank by assets and the largest by equity-trading revenue, maintained backup power at its lower Manhattan headquarters, which was surrounded by sandbags and sustained some flooding, according to Cohn. In a news conference Tuesday night, the mayor said that too many generators were located in the basements of buildings in the areas evacuated for flood risk, though he did not name NYU Langone. It was not immediately clear why NYU Langone's generator failed. In related news: New York's Bellevue Hospital Center is forced to evacuate and could stay shut two weeks after suffering storm damage. Located several stories above the flooded levels, generators at Bellevue continued to operate in the storm, but fuel pumps for the generators, which are located in the hospital's flooded basement, suffered damage. It's unclear whether power lines to the fuel pumps caused the damage or if water leaked through the pump's protective seals and caused the failure. Members of the National Guard carried fuel in 5-gallon buckets up 13 flights of stairs to keep the generators operating. Conditions at Bellevue made an evacuation "urgent" but "not emergent," said Dr. Natalie Levy, a physician in internal medicine there. Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2012-11-01 |
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