"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again"
--children's nursery rhyme

A hospital is in emergency mode on three shifts, 24 hours a day, as a matter of course. And in an institution with a campus of 27 buildings, we had one designated for each letter of the alphabet and one more--from A to AA--the place was so big that I gave an orientation tour around them during one afternoon of the program that was now in progress. We had thousands of staff--with our own cafeteria, emergency back up generator, police force, and repair shops, and many of us carried personal pagers or early cell phones. Think Starship Enterprise. As a City hospital, we were a major community resource on the border of several poor neighborhoods. But today was different, and my several dozen "rookies" were about to get a lesson about emergency conditions that...