NYC's Bellevue Hospital Evacuated; Diesel Spill In New Jersey; Another Meningitis Related Recall; Autism Study; Giants On Parade
O'BRIEN: Welcome back, everybody. You're watching STARTING POINT, in the city that never sleeps, trying to get moving again after the aftermath of Sandy. Some New York subways, most buses are up and running again this morning. They're free. That's good news. The bad news is, it's limited service. There's a carpool requirement, three people per car, if you want to come into Manhattan. The Jersey shore, which has been battered beyond recognition, new heartbreaking pictures of the damage there this morning. Governor Chris Christie says, "The Jersey shore of my youth is gone." And the storm's death toll now reaching 124 people, 56 in the United States, at least 28 in New York. Nearly 5 million customers are still waiting for power to come back on. National Guard troops have been transferring more than 700 patients out of New York City's flagship public hospital, Bellevue Hospital Center. They're dealing with power outages after flooding wiped out the basement fuel pumps, which of course, power the generators. Chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta has been following the transfer since it began. He's at Bellevue this morning. Sanjay, good morning.</s>DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. Good morning, Soledad. Let me just give you a little bit of background here. I think that the evacuations over here are complete, if not nearly complete. You see a few ambulances coming in here. Just a short time ago, we saw the National Guard about 50 troops come out and walk out to talk to them a bit. They said their job inside the hospital was done. So I think the evacuations are probably near complete, ahead of schedule. It's been a very busy couple of days, Soledad. We talked a little bit about this yesterday. But simply trying to keep those generators running, that required a lot of work. Because those fuel pumps were not working, there were essentially these bucket brigades, up 12 flights of stairs. People taking up fuel to these generators, it requires about 40 gallons an hour. That's what was going on, to keep Bellevue sort of up and running to the extent that it was. Once they realized that these fuel pumps were really beyond repair, that's when they announced, officially, that the evacuation, which as you mentioned, began yesterday, 700 some patients, to all these various hospitals around the city. I should point out one thing, Soledad. I was talking to some of these ambulance drivers here this morning. These ambulances come from all over the country. There's sort of this national resource network that comes together. So from Nevada, from California, Texas, Ohio, they come here to do exactly what they're doing, transport patients in situations like this -- Soledad.</s>O'BRIEN: Yes, I was told by a friend who was in the hospital that the ambulance she was transported out of, she was taken out of NYU Langone, she said, from Ohio, and they were prepositioned before the storm by FEMA and she felt it went very well I should mention. So NYU Langone which is the one we talked about earlier where there is evacuation is actually right next to Bellevue. They're right, very close to the water, a block from the water. I want to bring in, Sanjay, Dr. Irwin Redlener. He's the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and a professor at Columbia University, the school of public health there. You and I have talked a lot about hospitals in the wake of Katrina. Why do people put the power in the basement? It seems to me the first thing that's going to go in a flood or any kind of, not even a major a storm, but a minor storm, is your basement's going to flood.</s>DR. IRWIN REDLENER, M.D., DIRECTOR, NATIONAL CENTER FOR DISASTER PREPAREDNESS: Well, this has been a little bit of a technological whack-a-mole here, because we realized years ago after Katrina, and also even after the blackout of 2003, we had to do something about functioning generators, backup generators in hospitals. But it ended up that we moved the generators upstairs, but left the fuel pumps downstairs in the basement. So it's like we fixed the initial problem and now we have a secondary that no one seems to have thought about.</s>O'BRIEN: OK, so is that just complete stupidity, or is that, listen, it's financially expensive and people make the gamble that we're not going to invest the money and hope for the best.</s>REDLENER: Well, in this case, I do think it was not paying attention to all of the details. You know, I think people were well meaning. I don't think there was any sort of gross negligence here, except that somebody forgot an essential detail, in a situation that requires extraordinarily excruciating attention to every detail. So it seems to me somebody along the lines should have thought about those fuel pumps because they have to work also and be resilient with respect to flooding, those hospitals that are right on the river.</s>O'BRIEN: Let me ask Sanjay a question because he's still with us. Sanjay, I'm going to assume that transfer of patients and I believe the NYU Langone as well went smoothly. There have been no major problems. But the risk to patients is huge. Isn't that -- I mean, the way you bring a patient out of a hospital on a top floor is to kind of slide them down at times, right. Walk us through how that works.</s>GUPTA: Yes, even transfers within a hospital can be challenging at times, and here you have no power and very little light and these stairwells, as well. It's tough, Soledad. As you mentioned, I mean, if you consider a patient who has IV lines, for example, may be on a breathing tube, you usually have people manning those things so they don't get pulled out during a transport. If they require bagging, that needs to be continuously, throughout the entire transfer. And in this case, that transfer could involve carrying a patient down several flights of stairs. So there was a lot that could go wrong. And in hospitals, a transfer is highly coordinated thing, again, even within the hospital, to go get a CAT scan, for example. Here you're taking someone out into the elements. One thing I want to add about the generators, I've been asking a lot of people about this, for example, here at Bellevue, they do have these large tanks close to the generators, 250-gallon tanks, for example, to try to hold excess fuel close to the generators, up high. But that's about six hours' worth because they take about 40 gallons an hour to fuel these things. So they had the pumps again downstairs, but some of the tanks upstairs.</s>O'BRIEN: All right, thanks, Sanjay. Sanjay, appreciate it. Dr. Redlener, so what did we learn from Katrina? You and I spent many, many hours talking about the aftermath of Katrina. So what's the big takeaway and when do we implement that across the country?</s>REDLENER: Well, first of all, there's one big takeaway and it has to do with the general condition of infrastructure of the United States, and a small part of that, though a critical part, is the condition of hospitals and vital health care facilities. Have we paid enough attention to the lessons from the past about how to make sure that the equipment has enough power, how the generators work, have we tested them properly? In this case, we tested generators, but we didn't test the fuel pumps. We didn't know whether they would function under conditions of flooding and apparently they don't. It's not -- you know, obviously, we're learning these lessons now under extreme duress, as Sanjay said. We have to now expose patients to extraordinary risk, take them out of their relatively safe environments in intensive care units and sliding downstairs in the dark. It's an unfortunate, bad scene, and we should have learned more. But, you know, a lot of these things are called wake-up calls, but they turn out to be snooze alarms. We get a lot of coverage right now, but the question is, what are we going to do when the acute storm issues die down? Are we going to go back and fix all of the problems that we need to fix in order to keep our --</s>O'BRIEN: I hope so. I had all my kids at NYU Medical Center.</s>REDLENER: It's a good place with good people too.</s>O'BRIEN: I would agree with that. All right, Dr. Irwin Redlener joining us. It's nice to have with you us. We appreciate it.</s>REDLENER: Thanks.</s>O'BRIEN: All right, John's got an update of other stories making news.</s>BERMAN: Thanks, Soledad. The Coast Guard says some 300,000 gallons of diesel fuel has spilled at a New Jersey facility during Superstorm Sandy. Officials say most of the spill has now been contained. It happened after floodwaters rushed through a refining facility in Seaware, New Jersey and damaged two diesel storage tanks. In today's "A.M. House Call," another recall related to the fungal meningitis outbreak. Ameridose which is sister company to NECC, the pharmacy at the center of the outbreak, is now voluntarily recalling all of its products. Ameridose says it has not received any reports of negative reactions to its products, but simply complying with the FDA's call to improve its sterility testing procedures. The fungal meningitis outbreak has killed 29 people. New research into autism suggests that beginning specialized therapy as early as possible can significantly improve outcomes. A particular type of therapy called the Early Start Denver Model is credited with improving autism symptoms, normalizing brain activity, and controlling social behavior. The Centers for Disease Control says one in 88 children is currently diagnosed with autism, including one in 54 boys. Some one million people packed the streets of San Francisco to celebrate the Giants and their World Series title. Letting it sink in right now. The crowd was some 50 deep in some places along the parade route, which was downtown. San Francisco swept the Detroit Tigers Sunday for their second World Series title in just three years.</s>O'BRIEN: Yay for them. All right, still ahead this morning on STARTING POINT, the emotional toll of Superstorm Sandy keeps growing. Fifty six people were killed as a result of the storm here in the United States. Coming up next, we're going to take a closer look at some of the victims. We're back in a moment.