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In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New York City, killing dozens of people, destroying hundreds of homes, and causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage—all in the span of just 48 hours.
In southern Brooklyn—one of the areas hit hardest by the superstorm—a public hospital dedicated to treating the indigent was “pretty much underwater” and had no choice but to evacuate more than 220 patients, New York City Health and Hospitals/South Brooklyn Health COO Dianna Jacob told Healthcare Brew.
“We experienced three feet of water to one foot of water, depending where you were,” Dan Collins, facilities manager for South Brooklyn Health (SBH), the new moniker for the former Coney Island Hospital, added. “There was 144,000 square feet of first floor space that was completely flooded and had to be restored to get back in shape. That included our [emergency department], our main computers—all the elevators in the building were wiped out.”
In May—more than 10 years after Sandy crippled the Brooklyn hospital campus—SBH leaders officially welcomed patients to their new Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospital tower: an 11-story, climate-resilient structure, built with $923 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds.
The new facility is one of 30 resiliency projects initiated across four affected H+H facilities in Sandy’s wake. New York City’s public hospital system secured $1.8 billion in FEMA grant funding for such efforts.
The tower, which marks the first new public hospital to open in the city since 1982, features a storm-resilient design to prevent the flooding and related issues that plagued critical patient services and infrastructure after Sandy. That includes a second-floor emergency department and elevated ambulance bay, deployable floodgates in elevator lobbies, and a fifth floor dedicated to critical infrastructure.
“Our goal was to never be in that position again, where we would have to shutter the doors and leave and not have a good time frame to come back because of all the damage,” Collins said. “We looked at it from a point of view of, how do you protect the hospital building and how do you protect the campus?”
In addition to the new tower, SBH installed a new perimeter wall that should protect the campus up to a 100-year flood level, as well as a flapper valve to prevent sewer backflows—which also contributed to flooding during Sandy.
Beyond the protections against climate emergencies, Jacob said, the new facility was designed with a broader understanding of “resilience.”
“Resilience itself is really about elasticity and adaptiveness. You have to be able to flex and contract, and you also have to be able to adapt to different things coming at you,” she said.
For example, Jacob said that although FEMA requirements limited the project’s parameters, SBH was able to increase its ability to respond to a sudden influx of patients by building in additional surge capacity in its emergency department. The project also allowed the hospital to upgrade its medical equipment and technology to improve care delivery.
Jacob added that she also put the people who work at SBH at the center of design-related decisions.
“All too common, facilities are designed without the input of the people who actually do the work in them,” she said. “We really had every level of every department involved in the planning of it to the extent that we could.”