Sandy Underlines Need for Disaster Preparation

Hurricane Sandy gave medical research institutions from New York to Maryland an unwanted lesson in disaster preparedness in late October, knocking out power, swamping basements with water, and damaging the transportation networks used by workers and suppliers.

All hospitals and research organizations are federally required to have emergency plans, but their operational leaders acknowledge that it's impossible to consider and plan for every scenario.

At the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, administrators have learned the hard way how to protect their patients and research. “We're pretty storm-tested down here,” says Thomas Burke, MD, executive vice president and physician-in-chief.

After Tropical Storm Allison dumped 20 inches of rain on the Houston Medical Center in a matter of hours in 2001, the center built a flood wall and moved generators and pumps to the second and third floors.

Nearby Baylor College of Medicine lost thousands of research animals, and staff fought to keep remaining animals alive despite inches of muck on the floor, no power in the June heat, and thousands of carcasses to clean up.

“Once you go through something that horrendous and traumatic, you get really enthusiastic about planning so you don't have to go through that again,” says Peggy Tinkey, DVM, who ran Baylor's animal facility then and is now chair of the department of veterinary medicine and surgery at MD Anderson, where she's responsible for 120,000 research animals.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston tests its emergency power once a month and keeps a 3-day supply of fuel on site to make sure backup generators will keep essential services running, says Maria Papola, senior vice president of institute operations. Dana-Farber maintains an off-site freezer farm with its own power backup in case of a crisis at the main facility, and its 30 patient beds are at neighboring Brigham and Women's Hospital, which has its own disaster preparedness plan.

In Seattle, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the uncertainty is not whether but precisely when the next earthquake will happen. In addition to designing its buildings to withstand strong shaking, the center has earthquake straps on its nearly 1,000 freezers. “You don't want to be dancing with a 900-pound freezer,” comments Robert Cowan, director of facilities.

In recent years, the center has also upgraded its switches, moved fuel pumps to higher ground, built a redundant carbon dioxide system, put its data center on an upper floor, bought a high-powered portable generator in case the permanent ones fail, and created an emergency trailer filled with disaster equipment.

“If you don't have a good plan B, you'd better have a good résumé,” Cowan says about his line of work.

However, everyone admits to another truism of disaster preparedness: It's always easier to be prepared for the last crisis than the next one.