New York’s Ongoing Blackout: Hospitals In Lower Manhattan

Long after power is restored from Sandy, the effect of another more-precarious outage is still taking shape: Some of the largest hospitals in lower Manhattan remain shuttered. Other hospitals are scrambling to fill the gap, and concern is rising that the patchwork system can't last for long. NYU Langone Medical Center and Bellevue Hospital, the flagship of the city's public hospital system, were forced to evacuate due to loss of electricity and damage from Sandy. The Manhattan Veterans Affairs Medical Center evacuated patients before the storm and has not reopened.

There is no firm timetable on the hospitals' return. A spokesman for the city agency that runs Bellevue said that the hospital will likely be out for at least several weeks. NYU's outpatient clinics have reopened but the hospital itself remains closed. "This is not a tenable situation," said Bellevue's director of emergency medicine, Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, who holds a similar title at NYU. "There's just too many people. You can't dump this level of patients out on the open market."