UPDATE: Power restored at Royal Adelaide Hospital after it was left operating on generator power
Power has been restored at the Royal Adelaide Hospital after it was forced to run on generator power for hours on Friday following yet another blackout. Elective surgeries were cancelled and ambulances diverted as politicians demand answers.
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Power has been restored at the Royal Adelaide Hospital after it was left operating on generator power on Friday.
Mains power was re-instated at about 6.40pm last night.
Central Adelaide Local Health Network operations executive directors – Bronwyn Masters and Paul Lambert – acknowledged the hospital was “warm and at times uncomfortable”.
Events yesterday were the latest in a long line of blackouts to hit the new multibillion-dollar facility.
Anaesthetised patients were woken, ambulances were diverted in sweltering heat and 20 elective surgery operations were cancelled, delaying treatment for those patients.
Officials said they had not been advised of any adverse patient outcomes
The hospital had three losses of power within 15 minutes just after 2pm on Friday.
In another embarrassment for the state’s health system, the first outage lasted about two minutes, the second was about four minutes and the third was at least two minutes.
The hospital ran on generator power for hours after the incident as hospital administrators feared more outages.
Two anaesthetised patients needed to be woken up and nurses were forced to use torches during the blackout, which occurred when the electricity interconnector to Victoria tripped east of the border when six transmission towers were blown over in circumstances similar to the 2016 statewide blackout in SA.
Damage to the transmission lines was being assessed last night but SA’s power supply will be vulnerable during extremely hot weather.
An RAH announcement said: “The hospital has experienced an external loss of power. The hospital continues to function on generator power. Technical staff are investigating.”
SA Power Networks said there had been no loss of power supplied to the hospital.
“It was purely an internal issue at the RAH,” said SAPN spokesperson Paul Roberts.
Northern suburbs great-grandfather Robert Harris, 76, of Broadview, was having a growth cut out of his head when the power went out for a “good three minutes”.
Mr Harris praised nursing staff but expressed anger at the problem.
“If I had been in a major operation like eye surgery then someone could finish up blind,” the retired truck driver said.
“I am retired but I am still a taxpayer and it is a bloody disgrace.”
Last November a seven-minute outage was blamed on the interconnector linking South Australia to Victoria, although no other buildings suffered problems.
This was a week after a short outage of about 10 seconds before generators started working, while in September, surgeons were forced to pause an operation when the power went out for four minutes and the back-up power generator failed. The operation was completed successfully when the lights came back on.
A 20-minute blackout in February 2018 caused widespread delays and disruption to treatments.
The executive directors of operations at the Central Adelaide Local Health Network, Bronwyn Masters and Paul Lambert, issued a memo to staff saying the RAH had experienced interruptions to its power supply in the afternoon.
“The hospital’s generators kicked in, however when the hospital returned to the mains network, further instability was experienced,” it states.
“As a result the hospital has elected to continue to operate on generator power.
“Staff are advised to ensure they are familiar with their local business continuity plans and all new elective surgeries have been cancelled.
“The source of the outage is being investigated, however early indications are that the cause was external to the hospital.”
Health Minister Stephen Wade said: “The Government will engage an external independent engineering consultant to complete an urgent review into recent power failures at the new RAH.
“The external engineering consultant will work with CALHN and the facility managers, Celsus, to get to the bottom of the problem.
“While the backup generators kicked in and we are not aware of any adverse patient outcomes, the regularity with which this is happening is not acceptable to the Government, patients or staff. We must get to the bottom of a persistent problem in a problem-plagued project.”
Australian Medical Association SA president Dr Chris Moy said: “For such an advanced building that relies on technology for the safe provision of care it is absolutely essential to have continuous reliable power.”
Labor health spokesman Chris Picton also condemned the problem.
“Steven Marshall said before the election that keeping the lights on in a hospital was surely the easiest thing a government can do – but he’s failed that time after time across multiple public hospitals,” he said.
“This outage is extremely serious with patients being operated on while the lights were going in and out. No patient should be subject to operation by torchlight.
“Now we’ve had this happen four times in four months, enough of the internal briefings to the Minister – this needs a fully independent review into the blackout that will report publicly and stop this from happening again.”
SA has two interconnectors with Victoria – the major Heywood link through the South-East and the smaller Murraylink which goes via Berri.
Victoria’s AusNet Services said that as well as losing the SA interconnector, power supply was interrupted to the Portland aluminium smelter.
“We will work to repair and reconstruct these lines as soon as possible, given the extent of the damage it will take some time,” an AusNet spokesperson said.
Last week the Australian Energy Regulator approved the investment case for a $1.53 billion interconnector with NSW. The latest issues “highlight the pressing need” for that interconnector, an SA Government spokesman said.
The Australian Energy Market Operator said it had not ordered any blackouts and SA had been exporting power to Victoria at the time of the RAH outage.
The sudden loss of load on SA generators would have created instability in the grid. AGL said one unit at its Torrens Island power station tripped but power has now been restored.
Thousands of other properties in SA were affected by blackouts on Friday afternoon.