Who are they going to blame?

Once the dust settles, or the flood water recedes (in this case), someone will conduct a root cause analysis to figure out why the emergency generator at NYU Langone Medical Center failed to operate during Hurricane Sandy when the Con Edison power supply was disrupted.  Given that this investigation will involve two sectors of society (politics and health care) most characterized by a need to find someone to blame, some poor person at the hospital will be deemed to be the culprit.  It will not be a person too low in the organization, as that would generate sympathy and make it look like a cover-up of higher wrongdoing.  Nor will it be the CEO.  I am guessing it will be the vice president for facilities.  It has to be high enough in the organization to make it look a person of certain authority failed at his or her job.  Being a good soldier, he will gracefully fall on his sword and issue apologies. That will do the trick to produce a fine newspaper story.

The real story will likely be more complicated.  It will involve the difficult choices that have to be made by hospitals regarding how to allocate scarce resources in the operating and capital budgets.  It will involve the matrix used in these decisions, weighing the need for upgrades of clinical equipment and that of infrastructure.  Or, of adding staff on the clinical floors versus staff in the infrastructure areas.  The problem will reside in the priorities established by the administration and the hospital's board of trustees.  It will have been aggravated by insufficient state funding for Medicaid patients and concerns about future federal cuts in Medicare.

And, it will not be that the administrative and board judgments were necessarily wrong or suffered from a lack of rigorous analysis. It will just be that they turned out to be unlucky.  There but for the grace of God goes almost any hospital in the country, starved for resources to maintain basic infrastructure.

That, though, won't be in the newspaper story.  The personal tragedy of the guy who falls on his sword will result from the hospital's need to blame somebody to expiate its perceived sin in the public arena.