Power loss questions remain

Emergency department staff had to use torches when the power supply failed at Hawke's Bay Hospital. Photo / File

How and why a "perfect storm" forced Emergency Department staff to use torches while treating patients last month, after Hawke's Bay Hospital's back-up power supply failed to compensate for a faulty switch, is still being investigated.

Some parts of the hospital were without power for 30 minutes between 11.45am and 1.04pm on March 23 as the hospital's three generators were inconsistent in delivering back-up electricity.

Failed components from an automatic switch have been sent to Germany "for further analysis and diagnosis", Unison customer care manager Danny Gough said. "What we are trying to uncover is what caused this extraordinary event to happen - a perfect storm," he said.

The switch to the back-up generators was still in place and could be operated manually.

"We are very comfortable for the security of supply and we don't expect any issues to kick in."

Lifesaving equipment operated on battery power. Operating theatres were not in use at the time but some patients on dialysis machines were taken off early.

Staff in darker parts of the Emergency Department, which has many curtained-off cubicles, used their phones or torches to assist the emergency lighting.

"We have been working with the hospital's people since the failure to understand the operation of the generators and procedures, trying to ensure we have a response due to outages and how the automation of those generators should kick in," Mr Gough said. "That has been our focus since the incident. That will continue until we are both satisfied we can avoid this situation again. What we are trying to ascertain is should the generators have kicked in and kept running, overriding the switch, or did they not run properly because of something going on in the switch?

"What we understand is the switch failure was originally an intermittent fault, tripping in and out, and that may have caused the generators to trip in and out.

"That shouldn't matter to the generators, but somehow that has caused them to not run correctly, as they were designed to do."