Mayor: Bellevue Hospital evacuating patients

NEW YORK (AP) - Mayor Michael Bloomberg says Bellevue Hospital is evacuating hundreds of its patients due to storm damage, and is in the process of beds for them.

Officials said that about 600 patients were at the facility Wednesday morning, down to 350 at about noon as the evacuation continued.

The hospital has been diverting some patients since the initial outage.

Workers have been pumping about 17 million gallons of water out of the basement.

Bellevue lost power during Monday night's storm and had been operating on backup generators since then.

Even with backup power operating, the outage left many hallways and rooms in the hospital dark and knocked out key medical equipment.

New York University Langone Medical Center evacuated 300 patients Monday night after it lost generator power due to the storm.