May 24, 2013. Moore, Oklahoma. One of 41 American Red Cross emergency response vehicles roams through a neighborhood affected by the storm. The Red Cross volunteers deliver food, water, and relief supplies to […]
By Maureen Shawn Kennedy, MA, RN, AJN editor-in-chief
Whether the National Weather Service officially categorized Sandy as a tropical cyclone or a hurricane, the damage it caused was unprecedented as it made its way through the mid-Atlantic area and up through the Hudson Valley and New England.
I’m one of millions without power, but consider myself lucky, given the horrific damage sustained by many in neighboring areas. The severity of the storm really hit home as I learned about hospital closings—as any nurse or physician will tell you, it’s not something done without a great deal of deliberation, as moving severely ill patients carries its own significant risks.
In Brooklyn, Coney Island Hospital, a city-owned facility, was closed. In Manhattan, New York Downtown Hospital and the Manhattan VA Medical Center moved or discharged patients before the storm hit. And because of storm damage, New York University Langone Medical Center and more recently, Bellevue Hospital Center, the 275-year-old flagship hospital of New York’s municipal hospital system, were evacuated.
Stories are emerging about the heroic efforts of hospital staff who worked through the storm, evacuating patients down many flights of stairs, using plastic sleds as they slid patients down as many as 17 flights in some instances. The stories reminded me of those I heard from nurses at Charity Hospital in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and from nurses from St John’s Medical Center in Joplin, Missouri, which was hit by a tornado, or […]
Hurricane Sandy, October 28/ NASA photo
AJN‘s offices in Manhattan remain closed today, with no subway service and various continuing power outages in many areas where the staff live in New Jersey, Manhattan, and other surrounding areas. We’re all keeping up as well as we can with our production and editing processes. Meanwhile the presidential election, sure to have a substantial impact on health care in the U.S., creeps ever closer. Please let us know in the comments section any stories you have of nurses and their experiences during Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath. Or share photos. We’d love to get a sense of how it went for nurses out there who were affected by the storm, and we hope to provide open access to some of our disaster care and preparedness articles in the next couple days. 
AJN Oct. cover, detail
The editors