Thousands of disabled and elderly residents were trapped for weeks in high-rises without power, elevator service or heat. Doctors’ offices, pharmacies and dialysis and methadone clinics were inundated or lost electricity.

It resulted in an estimated billion dollars in hospital emergency response costs and another billion dollars in repairs. The disaster forced the closing of six city hospitals and 26 residential care facilities. Some were evacuated in the midst of the storm, without medications or records, and family members could not find them. Sandy displaced more than 6,400 patients. Vital mechanical elements remain unprotected in basements or on lower floors. Over a third of the beds in New York City’s hospitals and nursing homes and more than half of those in adult care facilities are in hurricane evacuation zones. Since Sandy hit a year ago, hard-working health and hospital officials have made good progress in defining the risks, but less headway in actually implementing solutions. Plans to get patients out of harm’s way are also inadequate. Which of her 50 patients should get one?ĭoctors faced these impossible choices because our creaking medical infrastructure leaves American hospitals, nursing homes and high-rises for the elderly vulnerable to even the most foreseeable disasters. The physician heading the intensive care unit was told that most backup power was likely to fail. More than seven years later, as Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, Bellevue Hospital’s basement filled with millions of gallons of floodwater from the East River. Sick babies? Critically ill adults? The elderly? WHEN the floodwaters rose around New Orleans hospitals after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, doctors wondered whom to rescue first.

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