VANCOUVER — St. Paul’s Hospital suffered a complete power failure late Saturday night, The Sun has learned.
The failure left the entire hospital complex in darkness for 10 seconds, until the hospital’s two old emergency generators kicked in. But it was two hours before full power was restored to all patient-care areas.
Meanwhile, on Monday many of the older parts of the hospital remained on emergency power. While normal power was restored to Providence I and II – the two newer towers in the St. Paul’s complex – the hospital’s three oldest buildings had to revert to emergency power Monday morning, when rising power usage in them threatened to cause another failure.
Staff in those buildings – the Comox Building, the McDonald Building, and the iconic 98-year-old Burrard Building, which houses the hospital’s emergency ward – have been ordered not to use any non-essential appliances such as coffee makers or space heaters, and have been advised to wear warmer clothing to work in anticipation of a cold snap forecast for this week.
The cause of the failure, essentially, was the hospital’s advanced age.
According to Bonita Elliott, acting vice-president of clinical programs and site director at St. Paul’s, the power went out at 10:45 p.m. Saturday when an old electrical feeder line supplying the three older buildings failed. The failure of the bypass line, Elliott said, caused the main feeder line to fail.
"When the old bypass line failed, breakers got blown, and then that caused a domino effect back down the line that put the entire site out.
"The feed line was at its end of life and beyond its life expectancy."
The failure did not endanger patients, Elliott said. For those patients on respirators, staff stood in for the short period the power was completely out and manually operated their respirators.
Hospital staff have been trained for just such emergencies, she said, specifically because of the age and deteriorating condition of St. Paul’s infrastructure.
However, for Saturday night and some of Sunday, the hospital did go on diversion status, advising other hospitals in the area that they may have to take patients, though "it was not totally clear," Elliott said, if any patients had been diverted.
Elliott also said that certain areas of the hospital could not operate at full capacity because of the power failure. The radiology department, for example, had to curtail the number of X-rays it could do.
The hospital succeeded in restoring full power and getting off the emergency generators by early Sunday morning, Elliott said.
But that soon changed:
"As everybody came in [Monday] morning, and started turning on everything, they started consuming too much power that we were providing to the building, and we were in danger of blowing everything again."
The three older buildings, she said, had to go back on the emergency generators.
The hospital’s operations leaders were called in then, she said, to conduct surveys of all non-essential power uses in their departments.
Elliott said the Ministry of Health had been advised of the power failure, and that the hospital hoped to replace the old feed "eventually."
It will be one of many things the hospital needs to replace of its aging infrastructure.
Last week, The Sun reported on a confidential in-house draft proposal that St. Paul’s was asked to prepare for the Ministry of Health.
The proposal called for a renovation of the hospital at its existing site over a period of seven years, at a cost of between $450 million and $610 million.
The proposal cited a wide array of problems with the hospital’s aging infrastructure, including leaky plumbing, chronically malfunctioning elevators, a dangerous lack of seismic upgrading and an electrical system so old it could not be tested for fear it would fail during testing.
The draft proposal also cited the advanced age and unreliability of the two emergency generators, one of which recently failed. Elliott said the generator had since been repaired and is now in working order.
The future of St. Paul’s has been in limbo since 2002, when the provincial government first admitted it needed replacement. Plans to rebuild an entirely new hospital on a site on Terminal Avenue have been shelved as being too expensive.
Hospital administrators are scheduled to meet with Ministry of Health officials in March to go over the draft proposal.
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