Power Failure: A nurse’s story

The storm was called a “bombogenesis.” On February 8, 2013, a blizzard and a hurricane simultaneously hit the East Coast with a fierceness not seen in a century. People flocked to a Cape Cod emergency shelter for warmth and food. They needed electricity to run their oxygen concentrators, their feeding pumps, and their CPAP machines. But the food never arrived and at the height of the storm, the power shut down. People shivered under army blankets for warmth. Then a woman disappeared.

This is the story told by Terri Arthur, RN, the Red Cross nurse who was assigned to manage the medical clinic in the shelter. “I pondered that I might have failed in some way,” writes Arthur. “Years later, it still haunts me. I continue to wonder what else I could have done.”