Also the housing for permenantly installed generators is usually really weather resistant - you don't really have to wrry about a strong storm hurting your generator (unless there is flooding).
Well, that's what happened in large areas of NYC, and that's why NYU hospital didn't even have backup power, despite their being "flood proof".
Quotes from an AP article yesterday:
"While both hospitals (nyu and bellvue) put their generators on high floors where they could be protected in a flood, other critical components of the backup power system, such as fuel pumps and tanks, remained in basements just a block from the East River.
Both hospitals had fortified that equipment against floods within the past few years, but the water —which rushed with tremendous force —found a way in.
Alan Aviles, president of New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corp., which operates Bellevue, said that after a scare last summer when Hurricane Irene threatened to cause flooding, Bellevue put its basement-level fuel pumps in flood-resistant chambers. It still isn’t clear whether water breached those defenses, but when an estimated 17 million gallons of water rushed through loading docks and into the hospital’s 1-million-square-foot basement, the fuel feed to the generators stopped working. The floodwaters also knocked out the hospital’s elevators.
For two days, National Guardsmen carried fuel to the generators, but conditions inside the hospital for patients and staff deteriorated anyway. The generators were designed to supply only 30 percent of the usual electrical load at the hospital, leaving a lot of equipment and labs hobbled. The hospital also lost all water pressure on Tuesday. Nearly 700 patients had been evacuated by Thursday afternoon.
“The precautions we had taken to date had served us well,” Aviles said. “But Mother Nature can always up the stakes.”
NYU Langone Medical Center had also tried to armor itself against floods. All seven of the generators providing backup power to the parts of the hospital involved in patient care are only a few years old and are on higher floors. The fuel tank is in a watertight vault. New fuel pumps were installed just this year in a pump house upgraded to withstand a high flood, said the hospital’s vice president of facilities operation, Richard Cohen. “The medical center invested quite a bit of money to upgrade the facility,” he said. The pump house remained “bone dry,” Cohen said. But water shoved aside plastic and plywood defenses and infiltrated the fuel vault, where sensors detected the potentially damaging liquid and shut the generators down. “The force of the surge that came in was unbelievable. It dislodged our additional protection and caused a breach of the vault as well,” Cohen said.
The power at NYU went out in a flash, leaving the staff scrambling to evacuate 300 patients with no notice.
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When the Northeast was hit with a crippling blackout in 2003, the backup power at several of New York City’s hospitals failed or performed poorly. Generators malfunctioned or overheated. Fuel ran out too quickly. Even where the backup systems worked, they provided electricity to only some parts of the hospital and left others in the dark."
