Born in flooded N.Y. hospital, kids are “stronger than storm”
NEW YORK» Their lives began with one of the most dramatic stories of Superstorm Sandy: the evacuation of 32 newborn babies from a major New York City hospital that got flooded and lost power. Hospital staffers tended to laboring women in the dark and carried mothers and tiny infants — 21 of them in intensive care — down stairways into the thick of the 2012 storm. Doctors and nurses squeezed air pumps by hand to fill some of the most fragile babies’ little lungs.
Every one was delivered to safety. Five years later, some of those babies are kindergarteners with mementos of the storm in their birthday celebrations, keepsake boxes and even their names. Their parents remember the experience with awe, humor, gratitude and the chagrin of sharing a day of personal joy with a natural disaster.
One mom tells her son: “We were the lucky ones that day.”
“I know this is the worst possible timing,” Tamar Weinstock said as she woke her husband, Allon, “but I think my water just broke.”
It was Oct. 29, 2012. Tamar’s due date was three weeks off. But their first child was coming, and so was Sandy, a 1,000-mile- wide behemoth with nearly 100-mph winds pushing a huge swell of ocean toward the coast of New Jersey and New York. The Weinstocks hurried from their home in the Long Island City section of Queens to NYU Langone Health’s Tisch Hospital, set along the East River in midtown Manhattan.
“Oh, my God, this is happening in the middle of a hurricane,” thought Tamar, a banker.
“You’re in the best possible place,” staffers reassured her.
The couple noticed the electricity flicker at 7 p.m. Then, at 8:30 p.m., the backup power failed, and the hospital plunged into darkness. Monitors went silent. Electronics that keep patient records were useless. Elevators stopped.
Labor didn’t. “You just have to keep going with what you’re doing,” Tamar realized.
NYU Langone had thought it could handle Sandy. After moving out frail patients before an ultimately uneventful Hurricane Irene in 2011, the hospital was allowed to stay open during Sandy after assuring city officials it had generators and fuel ready.
Then the storm raised the East River by more than 10 feet, crippling a nearby power plant and pouring more than 15 million gallons of water through air vents and other openings into the hospital’s basement. The water triggered sensors that shut off fuel to the generators providing power for 322 patients.
Doctors and nurses need- ed to deliver the baby. Now.
At 10:29 p.m., the Weinstocks saw their son for the first time — by flashlight.
“You hear your baby crying for the first time, and nothing else really matters,” says Allon, a construction project manager.
These days, their son Stone is a kindergartener so awesome that Awesome is his unofficial middle name, bestowed by a cousin.
“You almost feel guilty that for us it’s such a happy moment, because that’s what started our family,” Allon says. “But it’s not lost on us what everybody else went through.”
Kenneth Hulett III weighed about 2 pounds, with feet the size of fingernails. He’d been born 2½ months early, by emergency Caesarian, and rushed to NYU Langone’s neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU. Doctors determined he might have a potentially serious genetic disorder.
His parents, Emily BoltonBlatt and Kenneth Hulett Jr., were still in a recovery room when the power went out. Hulett raced up to the darkened NICU, where he recalls a nurse asking him to watch the numbers displayed on a machine running on backup batteries. Then the word came: evacuate.
Worried about BoltonBlatt but unable to leave their son’s side, Hulett followed the tiny boy, clasped in a nurse’s arms, down nine flights of narrow stairs lined by people with flashlights. The nurse and a doctor pumped air into Kenny’s lungs by squeezing a plastic bulb over and over, as a security guard carried an oxygen tank and two nurses toted monitors.
“Let us get to safety” was Hulett’s only thought as he sloshed through heavy rain to an ambulance.
Kenny would be hospitalized for another three months before coming home to Flushing in Queens.
For his first birthday, his grandmother had a banner made: “Stronger than the storm.”