Crap - a Sandy loss

From Yahoo/The Week:

How Hurricane Sandy destroyed years of medical research
Mice and other specimens were lost when a New York lab flooded and lost power, potentially setting back crucial studies for years.

As Hurricane Sandy flooded Lower Manhattan, the staff at New York University's Langone Medical Center rushed to evacuate 300 patients. At another NYU facility, the Smilow Research Building, thousands of lab mice drowned as the storm surge filled the basement with water. Many tissue samples and other specimens also were lost. "It's so horrible, you don't even want to think about it," said Michelle Krogsgaard, a cancer biologist. "All the work we did, all the time and money, we're going to have to start all over." What kinds of research were lost in the storm? Here, a brief guide:

What went wrong?
The so-called Frankenstorm knocked out power to the hospital. When the storm's record-breaking tides flooded the basement, where many of the research specimens were kept, the backup generators failed, leaving the 13-story research center in the dark. The mice were inundated. Other cells, tissues, and animals used for medical research died slowly in idle refrigerators, freezers, and incubators. Precious enzymes, antibodies, and DNA strands generated by scientists and stored at temperatures as cold as -80 degrees were also almost surely destroyed.

How significant was the loss?
The facility houses labs dedicated to research on heart disease, neurodegeneration, and cancer. Some scientists doing doctoral or post-doc research may have been several years into a five- or six-year program, and may have to essentially start over from square one. Some of the mice that were lost had been genetically engineered for use studying melanoma and other diseases, and it could take several years of careful breeding to rebuild the colony. Researchers have to identify a gene to be studied, inject the altered gene into mouse blastocysts, and make sure the offspring can pass the traits along to following generations. "Some mice are unique, they're just made for certain research," one non-NYU researcher said, and there's no way to replace them without starting from scratch. "This does not equate to a loss of life," one NYU source told the New York Daily News, "but it is extremely disheartening to see years of research go down the drain."

Not very well thought out. Moving a cryo-freezer is a pretty big deal but they had a weeks notice. Moving a couple thousand mice is simple -- even just the expediency of moving them to an auditorium in the same building -- not like they are going to hold classes during the storm.