Safe from the Storm: Creating Climate-Resilient Health Care Facilities

摘要

It was New York City, 29 October 2012. Hurricane Sandy forced the evacuation of more than 6,400 patients from six hospitals and 31 residential care facilities.1 Among them was Bellevue, the nation’s oldest public hospital, which saw its first sustained closure since opening in 1736.2 The hardest hit was NYU Langone Medical Center, where patients were evacuated down a dark stairway after power systems failed.3 The hospital suffered nearly $1 billion in damages,1 remained fully closed for two months, and went without an emergency room for a year and a half.4 Perhaps remarkably, no patients died as a result of the closures and evacuations.5In the aftermath of disaster, local municipalities typically reflect on what went right and what went wrong. New York City was no exception after Sandy, which caused some $19 billion in economic losses across the five boroughs.6 The city’s new Building Resiliency Task Force subsequently translated lessons from the storm into building code modifications designed to reduce future losses from extreme weather events.7But few of these improvements were targeted toward hospitals, says Robin Guenther, a New York City–based architect and expert on sustainable health care facilities. So she and colleague John Balbus, a senior advisor for public health with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), decided to fill that gap.