As NYU officials tally the damage, they will inevitably have to
address the issue of whether the disaster could have been
avoided or minimized. “Putting animals (or electrical control
equipment) in a basement within a stone’s throw from a tidal
river is not a wise idea,” immunologist Alan Frey wrote in an
e-mail to Nature after losing all of his mice, which were housed
at the Smilow. At the Texas Medical Center in Houston in 2001,
Tropical Storm Allison destroyed millions of dollars of
equipment and killed thousands of lab animals ranging from mice
to monkeys. In the aftermath, engineers constructed flood gates
and moved animal facilities and crucial components of the power
system out of the basement. The Smilow, which opened in 2006,
can withstand a storm surge of about 3.7 meters — 20% higher
than that expected from a once-per-century flood, according to
the NYU. Now that Sandy has overtopped those defenses, officials
say that they will be assessing what they can do differently in
the future. Bartelle, whos