Hospital workers evacuate patient Deborah Dadlani from NYU Langone Medical Center during Hurricane Sandy on Monday night in New York City.

What no one had counted on was that when the power failed all over downtown Manhattan on Monday night, so, too, did the hospital’s backup generator. Now everyone would have to be evacuated, and in terrifying conditions…
Medical personnel (including one med student) put Virginia on a kind of sled and began moving her out of the building. “Three young men carried Virginia down twelve flights of stairs, so slowly, so methodically,” Cathy Rossano [Virginia’s mother] said. “They were phenomenal.”
The delicate process, repeated with hundreds of patients, took nearly a half hour, and, when they got to the street, the Rossanos encountered a line of ambulances, many of them with volunteers who had driven hundreds, even thousands, of miles to help. “There were people from California, Texas, from everywhere,” Cathy Rossano said. “Our guys were from somewhere in Illinois.”
The only problem with ambulance drivers from somewhere in Illinois is that they don’t necessarily know how to get from N.Y.U. to Columbia Presbyterian, in Washington Heights…

Leaving Langone: One Story (David Remnick, New Yorker)

Pic via Time