From flood barriers to hurricane-proof windows, a look at N.Y. hospital resiliency projects

At NYU Langone Medical Center in Kips Bay, a stone's throw from the East River, Hurricane Ida was a reminder of what could have been. Flooding, power outages, patient evacuations—none came to pass at the hospital when Ida flung torrential rain over the city Sept. 1, despite its being in the highest-risk flood zone.

Paul Schwabacher, senior vice president of facilities management at NYU Langone, chalked it up to the major resiliency projects the hospital performed after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. It used a portion of the $1.5 billion in aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to install high-tech steel flood barriers that can block an entrance with the flick of a switch, emergency power systems and new drainage and piping.

"That made it so it was essentially a nonevent, the rain from Ida," Schwabacher said.

Twenty percent of the city's hospital beds, including NYU Langone Medical Center's, are in or near flood zones, according to the city's Independent Budget Office. More are likely at risk; the city's flood maps haven't been updated in 14 years, according to a news report. With climate change increasing the incidence of extreme weather events like Ida, hospitals are undergoing resiliency projects to fortify themselves against whatever a future natural disaster could possibly throw at them.

Richmond University Medical Center on Staten Island is not in a flood zone but still experienced minor flooding during Ida, although it did not interrupt care across its 470-plus beds, a spokesman said.

The hospital is in the process of spending nearly $43 million, with financial support from FEMA, to replace 700 windows and make them hurricane-force resistant. The project will also feature new flood-control measures to protect against water damage and harden the hospital building against strong winds. It is expected to be completed in the spring.

A separate $28.5 million project is building a plant the hospital can use to generate its own electricity in the event of a power outage. The system is due to go online by the end of the year.

NYC Health + Hospitals/Coney Island, which is by the waterfront, has several major resiliency projects underway. It installed a flood barrier around the ambulatory portion of its campus, and its new inpatient tower has been fortified to account for 500 years of floods, said Christine Flaherty, senior vice president of capital projects, construction and design at the public health system.

"Typically hospital engineers look at a 100-year flood plan," Flaherty said. "But we're a waterfront city. We need to go further than that, such as doing flood mapping to account for future sea level rise as well."

The Coney Island hospital's infrastructure project comes from a $1.2 billion FEMA grant the health system received, of which Coney Island got the largest share, at $700 million. The rest was spread around the other hospitals, some of which saw damage from Ida.

Elmhurst and Lincoln hospitals in Queens and the Bronx, respectively, saw some flooding in elevator pits and basements, Flaherty said, but it did not affect clinical operations.

Resiliency projects need not always be major undertakings, said Joe Ienuso, group senior vice president of facilities and real estate at New York-Presbyterian. Instead, they can take the form of continuous smaller investments in infrastructure exposed to the elements, such as roofs, exteriors, heating and cooling systems, and electrical systems, he said.

"At any given time there are probably 75 to 100 such smaller projects taken to harden these points," Ienuso said.

But Ida did push Ienuso's team to evaluate whether bigger-scale solutions are needed. He said some of the system's hospitals experienced flooding in cellars and utility tunnels and leaks from rooftop storm-drainage systems.

Such solutions could include new systems to ensure existing ones can perform efficiently, like one that could clear debris from drainage points in the roof, he said.

"There will always be an associated cost of these upgrades, but there's an even bigger cost of doing nothing," he said, "Mitigating risk will be the biggest payout."

This story first appeared in our sister publication, Crain's New York Business.