Amazing how we have to keep relearning the same lessons. When I was a clinical perfusion student in Houston in 1985, the chief perfusionist of Texas Heart Institute told my class of his experience during Hurricane Carla in 1961. An emergency heart surgery was under way when Carla hit Houston. The power failed and the emergency generators smoothly kept the power running to the cardio-pulmonary bypass pump; unfortunately the generators were in the basement of Texas Children's Hospital and when the flood waters filled the basement, the generators died. The perfusionists (one staff, one student) finished the case turning the pumps by hand. When I was a student there, the generators were located on the roof.