KIPS BAY — NYU Langone Medical Center and the Manhattan VA hospital reopened on Monday, Aug. 29, after both facilities were evacuated in advance of Hurricane Irene.
The Manhattan VA suffered some minor leaks and parking lot flooding, and NYU Langone Medical Center's Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine will remain closed for two weeks while damage from water leakage is repaired.
Both hospitals reported that none of the roughly 600 evacuated patients was injured in the evacuation or the storm.
The impressive safety report is due in large part to area hospitals that sheltered evacuees as wind and rain battered the city this past weekend.
One facility that accepted a number of patients from NYU was Mount Sinai Medical Center.
Officials at Mount Sinai knew the storm was going to present challenges. Aside from the potential for structural damage, the shutdown of the transit system would leave them short-staffed with an influx of evacuated patients, some of whom were critically ill, said Nishant Goyal, 24, a fourth-year medical student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
“We didn’t know how bad it was going to be,” Goyal said. “We just knew we needed help.”
So Goyal helped organize more than 120 student volunteers to care for the evacuated patients from 6 p.m. on Saturday to 11 p.m. on Sunday. Some were tasked with transporting patients. Some had to monitor the critically ill. Others had to make rounds to check for flooding around the hospital.
“A lot of the student jobs weren’t necessarily glamorous,” Goyal said. “They were desperately needed, because we were so short-staffed.”
The scene inside the hospital as the storm approached was at times chaotic and strangely calm, Goyal said.
Routing volunteers to different areas in need proved harried in the early hours of the hurricane. But meetings with administration officials sometimes fell silent, Goyal said, as everyone stared silently at the news coverage on televisions, hoping for the best.
“You’re kind of at the mercy of what’s going on out there,” Goyal said.
Throughout the ordeal, the main objective was to keep everyone safe and calm, she said. Some family members accompanied patients to their transfer hospital, but then left as the storm approached. A large portion of the volunteer effort centered on easing patient anxiety, which could exacerbated existing medical conditions.
Volunteers worked in six-hour shifts over the course of 30 hours and only came up dramatically short of help between midnight and 6 a.m., Goyal said. When they realized the need for more hands, some of the students started calling friends, many of whom ran from nearby student housing to the evacuation center in the pouring rain to offer help.
Now that the storm has passed, and NYU Langone Medical Center and the Manhattan VA hospitals have reopened, patients are slowly being moved back to the medical corridor along First Avenue in Kips Bay.
“It was pretty gratifying to say the least,” Goyal said of the volunteer effort. “Luckily the storm passed over without too much of a hitch.”
