A month after Superstorm Sandy ravaged downtown and Brooklyn hospitals, the city’s medical system has not stopped the bleeding.
Emergency rooms at NYU Langone Medical Center, Bellevue Hospital Center, the Manhattan VA Hospital and Coney Island Hospital remain shuttered due to massive storm damage and contamination — and are not expected to reopen until early next year.
They evacuated hundreds of patients and aren’t admitting new ones.
The crisis has forced paramedics, already racing against time, to face greater life-saving pressure.
“We have to go 42 blocks north of Bellevue to Weill Cornell” — the next Level 1 trauma center, said EMT Steve Katz. “A few minutes can make a difference, but we try to keep them alive until we get there.”
The closed ERs and the deluge of displaced patients has caused a crush at open emergency rooms and has filled available hospital beds — to the point where patients are being seen in hallways, workers say.
“It’s organized chaos,” said a nurse at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center on East 68th Street, one of several hospitals absorbing patients from closed facilities.
“Some people come to us because their surgeries were canceled and they are just waiting for their surgeries to happen,” another nurse said.
“Other patients have pysch issues. There are homeless people who would have gone to another hospital coming into ours. There are hallway patients now because the emergency department is just so flooded.”
One lab technician said he’s been glued to his microscope ever since the storm rolled into town.
“I used to look at 90 to 100 specimens a day; now I’m looking at 200.”
NYU, which closed its Tisch Hospital and Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine — a total 879 beds — is dealing with medical waste and dead research mice in flooded basements. A spokesman there declined to comment on the status of the cleanup and recovery.
Bellevue — with 912 beds, including 339 for psychiatric patients and 34 for criminals — saw its basement inundated with 17 million gallons of water, swamping mechanical, electrical and computer systems, including heat, ventilation, fire alarms and water pumps, spokesman Ian Michaels said.
“There’s air sampling going on multiple times a day by environmental contractors,” he said.
Bellevue and Coney Island — which has 371 beds — have opened 24-hour “urgent care” walk-in centers in nearby buildings, but divert serious cases elsewhere.
Lenox Hill Hospital on East 64th Street has opened three new patient wards and is running back-to-back surgeries in its packed operating rooms, an insider said. About 500 NYU nurses are pitching in there, and the hospital has fast-tracked admitting credentials to about 300 NYU doctors.
The patient load has doubled at Beth Israel Hospital in Gramercy Park, staffers say.
“There’s such a backlog of people in the ER waiting for a bed,” a nurse said. “When one patient is discharged, we have about a half-hour to get ready for the next.”
The City Council has appropriated $300 million just for city Health and Hospitals Corp. facilities, which include Bellevue and Coney Island hospitals.