When I heard in October that Superstorm Sandy was projected to make landfall somewhere in the vicinity of DC and Maryland, I prepared for the worst. I stocked up on non-perishable goods and evacuated to higher ground. (The rest of my family was already coincidentally out of town and harm’s way.)
I put fresh batteries into two flashlights and installed a flashlight app on my smartphone for good measure. Although I didn’t give it much thought at the time, I assumed that hospitals in Sandy’s path were taking similar precautions – stocking medical supplies, testing backup generators and so forth. So when a power failure at NYU Langone Medical Center forced an evacuation of the entire hospital, with heart-stopping scenes of neonatal ICU nurses cradling respirator-dependent newborns down several flights of stairs to safety, I couldn’t understand what had happened. How had they not been better prepared? Had NYU administrators been the equivalent of residents of low-lying coastal areas who ignored repeated warnings and defied evacuation orders?
As it turned out, NYU did a lot of things right before the storm. According to an article in ProPublica, after the scare of last year’s Hurricane Irene, the hospital moved its emergency generators from street level to the rooftop and thoroughly waterproofed the generators’ fuel pumps. Unfortunately, they neglected to relocate or protect the electricity distribution circuits, which remained in the basement and were quickly disabled by the flooding. As in many areas of health care, doing everything “almost right” wasn’t good enough.
All people are fallible, and health professionals no less so than others. But medicine is usually less forgiving of simple mistakes. A technically perfect surgery is a disaster because it was performed on the wrong body part. A patient develops a life-threatening infection because a doctor forgot to wash his hands. A child dies three days after being discharged from an emergency room because his parents were not notified of critical lab values that came back hours after they left.