The cause of a power outage at the Royal Adelaide Hospitalrevealed
The cause of a power outage at RAH over the weekend has been revealed – and it wasn’t the only hospital to lose power on Saturday night.
SA News
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A sensitive circuit breaker is being blamed for the latest power outage at the Royal Adelaide Hospital – and it has been revealed it is not the only hospital to lose power on Saturday night.
Boffins and bureaucrats were last night scrambling to work out why a third power outage has hit the hospital in the space of two months.
The seven-minute outage on Saturday night was initially pinned on the interconnector linking South Australia to Victoria – but no other buildings lost power.
Health Minister Stephen Wade this morning told ABC Radio Adelaide a circuit breaker, that aims to protect medical equipment at the RAH, disconnected the hospital’s power.
Mr Wade said such a surge protector was necessary at the hospital.
“Hospitals are critical infrastructure,” he said.
“The threat to have our sensitive medical equipment knocked out because we weren’t prepared for an... electrical surge is not a risk that we can take.
“If we didn’t provide that firewall...we might be spending longer and even more concerning recovery strategies to test and replace our medical equipment.”
Mr Wade said a similar outage also occurred at the Lyell McEwin Hospital at the same time and he was also looking into whether other hospitals were also affected.
The power cut off at the RAH at 6.50pm, prompting the emergency generators to kick in. The only person believed to be affected was someone stuck in a lift.
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 week ago there was a short outage of between five and ten seconds, after which the generators started working.
Mr Wade said on Sunday that the latest incident was an “unnecessary disruption” to the $2.4 billion hospital and he wanted to find out if there was a connection between the three incidents.
“This is the third event in recent months and I’m keen to find out if there’s a pattern,” he said.
“It’s always concerning when the power supply into our major hospital is disrupted. The power generators, the backups, worked as they are meant to work but it is concerning that over recent months we’ve had a number of incidents where the power supply hasn’t been able to be relied on.
“I’ll be seeking an urgent briefing to see if there’s anything we can to try to protect the power supply.”
The Australian Energy Market Operator confirmed on Saturday night that the Heywood interconnector tripped, “resulting in SA separating from the rest of the National Energy Market”.
The cause was unknown, AEMO said.
An interconnector tripping does not necessarily cause a blackout, and SA Power Networks said no other customers were affected.
“I can confirm there was no interruption to supply for SA Power Network customers due to the interconnector connection being lost,” corporate affairs manager Paul Roberts said.
Opposition health spokesman Chris Picton has called for an investigation and said the State Government had been “caught out” blaming the interconnector.
“This has happened three times in two months and each time the Government has had some flimsy excuse rather than properly looking into the problems and addressing them,” he said.