UNDATED (CBS) -- The staff at a Manhattan hospital has become a symbol of all the people who helped others during superstorm sandy. The facility lost power at the height of the storm. All the patients had to be taken to other hospitals. There as some very tiny children were safely moved out.
Doctors, nurses and hospital staff sought to evacuate about 300 patients from Manhattan's NYU Langone Medical Center Monday night.
The most vulnerable were 20 new born babies clinging to life in the neonatal intensive care unit. Jo-An Tremblay-Shepherd says, "The power went off completely and all of the monitors you're seeing all these monitors here and there's a lot of buzzing and whatnot and everything just went."
Jo-An Tremblay-Shepherd's son Jackson, born 27 weeks prematurely, was carried in the dark by a nurse who also held his oxygen tank. Tremblay-Shepherd says, "We had to go down nine flights of stairs that were wet and had adult patients lying on the floors in like stretchers it was pretty crazy and all this in total darkness."
Outside the hospital Jeremy Donovan had come to check on his son William who was born three weeks ago with congenital heart disease but no one would let him in. He says, "I tried to explain that I had a 3-week-old fresh off of heart surgery but that negotiation was fruitless."
Donovan waited outside in the driving wind and rain for two hours and finally, a doctor escorted him inside. Donovan says, "We kind of jogged ran 15 flights of stairs to his floor and got to the top of the stairs and the floor was pitch black. I found my son and I found his nurse and that was kind of an awesome moment."
A harrowing drive down dark, slick streets to hospitals that hadn't lost power followed: Mount Sinai for William, Montefiore for Jackson. Tremblay-Shepherd says, "For his situation for his age he's doing really good considering the long drive in the ambulance it took to get here."
All the patients at NYU were successfully evacuated to nearby hospitals by Tuesday morning. No one is more grateful for the hospital's response than the parents of those 20 infants. Donovan says, "They didn't choose the hurricane they didn't choose the power outage but they responded perfectly to it as a parent its very intense to deal with something like this with your kid but to know he's getting the best possible care has meant the world to my wife and I and we're just really grateful."