Dress rehearsal for disaster.(Guest Editorial)

When the lights suddenly went out in the late afternoon at Lenox Hill Hospital, a 652-bed community hospital in Manhattan's Upper East Side, nobody knew what had happened.

By the time the Blackout of 2003 ended for us, more than 24 hours later, it had become clear not only what had happened, but also how well our medical team had responded to a potentially dangerous situation that took us all by surprise.

After all that we had experienced on Sept. 11, 2001, and during the anthrax crisis, the Aug. 14th blackout made it clear that we were far better prepared this time around. It turned out not to be a crisis for us, thanks to the collaboration that took place among our departments and our multidisciplinary hospital staff. Their dedication and determination to help each other out and care for our patients was inspirational. We learn from these experiences, fine-tuning our ability to notify people quickly, marshaling our resources, and coordinating our efforts to help patients in need.

Firstly, because we didn't know whether the night staff would be able to make it in, we asked the day staff to stay They were bighearted and understanding and wanted to help in any way they could. In fact, the attending staff was lined up in the emergency room asking what they could do.

A cardiology fellow who worked in our hospital walked 8 miles in the dark of night from Queens, across the 59th Street Bridge, to see what help was needed. Other hospital staff drove in, braving intersections with nonfunctioning traffic lights.

We had to call in the entire medical staff of the division of general internal medicine--our core teaching faculty--to manage the unusually large number of patients coming into the hospital during the blackout. The emergency medical services staff, with their tireless efforts to triage and treat, more than met the challenge of coping with the additional workload.

Patients were suffering from falls in the darkness and other ...