Jan 22, 2009 6:38 am US/Eastern
Smokey Fire Causes Chaos At Mt. Sinai Med Center
Blaze Starts In Mechanical Room, Spreads To 1st Floor ER And Grows To 3 Alarms As Patients Evacuated
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
A fire at a major hospital sent smoke pouring through an emergency room Wednesday, forcing hundreds of patients to move across the sprawling complex.
There were no reports of injuries among patients, but six firefighters were hurt.
The fire began shortly before 6:30 p.m. in a second-floor mechanical room at the Mount Sinai Medical Center and spread to a first-floor emergency room, Fire Department of New York spokesman Frank Dwyer said. The fire was confined to the mechanical room; its cause was unknown.
Flames in the Manhattan building were visible from the adjacent Madison Avenue, said Janet Montero, a manager at the nearby One Fish Two Fish restaurant.
Dwyer said patients were removed from the east wings to the west wings of the 12-story hospital, which has nearly 1,200 beds, as firefighters searched the building. The patients had been on the third through 11th floors.
Hospital representatives did not immediately return telephone calls seeking comment.
Jesus Ochoa, 43, a patient awaiting a surgical procedure Friday, was spending time with his family in his eighth-floor room when an alarm went off, said his daughter, Jessica Ochoa.
"Then the smoke comes," she said. "The smell was strong, like something was burning."
Four to five minutes later, smoke was everywhere, and "we couldn't breathe," she said.
A nurse initially told the family members it was safer to stay in the room than to leave, but a hospital staffer then instructed them to put wet towels across their faces and led them to the ground floor of a nearby building, Jessica Ochoa said. She said she saw one nurse faint and another sob during a brisk but orderly evacuation.
Wrapped in a blanket and a hospital gown in a lobby more than two hours later, Jesus Ochoa said, "I want to go back. I want to do my surgery."
Patients, employees and visitors milled in the hospital's lobbies, looking for information.
Visitor Ellen Marakowitz still had none after about an hour of circling through the hospital's various entrances, trying to ascertain the whereabouts of her 88-year-old mother, Helen Marakowitz, who was hospitalized with a broken hip and pneumonia. Her mother's aide had called to say there was a fire, smoke had spread to the area of her mother's eighth-floor room and the two were being moved.
Marakowitz, who rushed to the hospital from her Manhattan home, said she had spoken to a hospital employee but hadn't located her mother.
"I'm sure she's fine, but it would be nice to know where she is," Marakowitz said. "My mother's 88, and the aide is terrified, so I'm not just going to ignore them."
Mount Sinai was founded in downtown Manhattan in 1852. It has been in its present spot, occupying four square blocks on the Upper East Side, since 1904.
Please stay with CBS 2 HD and wcbstv.com for more on this developing story.
(© 2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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