NYU Langone Medical CenterWikimedia, NyulmcwebteamThe New York University Langone Medical Center was among the hardest hit of research institutions along the east coast when super storm Sandy blew through in late October. Thousands of lab rodent and hundreds of biological samples were destroyed as the facility was flooded by a record-setting storm surge and generators failed to power the lab’s freezers and refrigerators. Now, 6 weeks later, researchers are still trying to get things back in order.
“The damage is truly appalling,” National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, who last week (November 30) visited Langone and met with NYU leadership, wrote on his blog. “The infrastructure has been essentially obliterated.”
Associate professor Stuart Brown, head of the research computing and bioinformatics at the lab, talks in his blog about the devastating events. The informatics group's computing cluster, located in a sub-basement of the building, was “flooded to the ceiling (and half-way filled the floor above) for a couple of days with water from the East River mixed with fuel oil, and the contents of the adjacent mouse breeding lab and Gamma Knife medical suite.” The result: 700 computer nodes were destroyed and had to be “bagged and hauled out as toxic ...
