Generator glitch in hospital power cut

Dialysis patients were sent home and some scheduled surgery was cancelled after Wellington Hospital was hit by a power cut and a generator glitch.

A local grid failure cut power to the hospital yesterday morning for about an hour – the third outage to the hospital's electricity supply in the past six months.

Five operations already underway were completed without problems after the hospital's emergency uninterruptible power supply continued to power vital equipment.

However, nine people having dialysis sessions at the hospital were sent home as a precaution and five operations scheduled for the afternoon were cancelled for the same reason.

A Capital & Coast District Health Board spokesman said back-up generators had kicked in immediately after the power cut.

However, hospital staff who contacted The Dominion Post said the generators were not working properly for the first 20 to 30 minutes after the power cut.

Intensive care clinical director Peter Hicks, who also has oversight of the hospital's technical services, later confirmed there had been a problem with the generators.

"Something happened on our campus that caused the [main] power supply through the substation to be disconnected. The generators started but there was some difficulty getting them connected to the hospital."

Technical staff were now investigating what had gone wrong, he said. "We're not clear on why the generators weren't able to be connected."

The power cut follows two other outages at the hospital this year.

In April, one of the hospital's two emergency generators failed to kick in after a citywide blackout.

Then in June, an uninterruptible power supply was interrupted, causing a "major unplanned outage" to the hospital's data centre, which powers all its computer systems.

However, Dr Hicks said the latest power cut was unrelated to the earlier outages and did not reveal any systemic problems with the hospital's power supply.

"I have complete confidence that this isn't an ongoing issue, because these are unrelated problems."

There was already some maintenance that was being done on the power system.

Sending home dialysis patients did not necessarily indicate that the hospital needed further back-up capacity, he said.

Dialysis equipment could have been run off the uninterruptible power supply, but it made sense to save capacity if non-urgent treatment could be put off for a day.

- © Fairfax NZ News