Shortly after 3:00 a.m. on the morning of the Big Apple Blackout, July 14, 1977, the Lynbrook volunteers of the Floodlight Unit were awakened for their unit to respond to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, which was in desperate need of a generator to light up portions of the darkened hospital. The Floodlight truck, back then, contained a 15 KW generator, along with a portable 5 KW generator unit. The Floodlight members who responded were Bill Dauscher, Bill Hahl, Bob Shephard, Captain Gordon MacLeman, Lieutenant Jerry McLaughlin, Fred Pearsall, Peter Skeris, Michael Misterly, Artie DeCelle, and Robert Meier. All of them were also members of Lynbrook’s Tally-Ho Engine Company 3, where the Floodlight Unit was then housed. The Floodlight responded to the city that morning led by Third Deputy Chief William Quinn, a member of Engine Company 1. Chief Quinn, in his chief ’s car, led the Floodlight truck along the darkened highways to the Queens Midtown tunnel where one lane was opened just for them to get into Manhattan. The only lights were the headlights and the revolving red lights on both fire vehicles.

When the firefighters reached Bellevue, they learned that another generator had been found but that one was desperately needed at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. They were told that newborn and premature babies were dying because of the lack of electricity to keep them warm. They were also told that babies were being wrapped in aluminum foil to help maintain their body temperature. Somehow the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital’s back up generator had failed.

Lieutenant McLaughlin would later tell New York Newsday in a story that, “We had calls coming over the air that babies were dying in the hospital.” The volunteers raced from Manhattan to Brooklyn to help. Immediately upon their arrival at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, just after 4:00 a.m., Bob Shephard, a Long Island Lighting Company employee, and Fred Pearsall, a New York Telephone employee, ran a power line through a window of the hospital and hooked up the truck’s generator to the hospital’s electrical system. The first to receive electricity from the fire truck were the incubators in the neo-natal nursery where 41 babies were near death from the lack of heat. With the power back on, all the babies would survive. One doctor would say in a Newsday article that because babies have no fat they lose heat fast, which could result in cardiac arrest or serious breathing problems.

The volunteers also ran additional power lines from the truck and, using portable lights, were able to light up five floors of the hospital. One firefighter even crawled through a window with a portable light so that a pharmacist could get the prescribed medication he desperately needed from the darkened pharmacy. They were also able to power the hospital’s paging system so that doctors could be called.

The volunteer firefighters would later say that while they were working to get electricity into the building, emergency room doctors were outside in the parking lot operating on people under the lights of a small portable generator provided by FDNY. One firefighter said that rioting was going on in the surrounding neighborhood of the hospital and that gun shots could be heard in the distant darkness. Lt. McLaughlin would also later tell Newsday that about 60 people had surgery in the hospital parking lot and that 36 of them had been hurt in the rioting. Lynbrook’s Floodlight volunteers stayed at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital maintaining the power into the hospital from their fire truck for over 15 hours until they were relieved by the National Guard who brought in a generator and took over. The president of Brooklyn Jewish  Hospital, then officially called, The Jewish Hospital and Medical Center of Brooklyn, would later send a letter thanking the Lynbrook Floodlight volunteers for their help, saying, “Because of your help, 41 premature and extremely sick newborn infants are alive today. On behalf of the families of these infants and our hospital, we wish to thank you.”

It is hard to believe that 30 years have passed. All of those babies in the neo-natal nursery that day lived and now would be grown ups themselves because of the efforts of those Lynbrook volunteers. Of the original group of firefighters that responded that day, only Bill Dauscher and Bill Hahl, are still members of the Floodlight Unit and Tally-Ho Engine 3. The other members have moved away, and Chief Quinn has passed away.