Overgrown weeds spark blackouts, forcing lifesaving hospital equipment onto battery power
Sydney’s eastern suburbs were plunged into chaos yesterday when a one-hour power blackout left several of the state’s largest hospitals relying on their third and last line of defence — battery power — to keep their patients alive.
Sydney’s eastern suburbs were plunged into chaos yesterday when a one-hour power blackout left several of the state’s largest hospitals relying on their third and last line of defence — battery power — to keep their patients alive.
Overgrown weeds at a Double Bay substation are believed to have caused the mass outage.
This morning, Premier Gladys Berejiklian demanded energy provider Ausgrid explain what caused power blackouts that plunged some eastern suburbs into darkness yesterday.
Speaking in Mulgoa, Ms Berejiklian described the blackouts as a “very unfortunate incident” that shouldn’t have happened.
“Obviously that was an incident affecting households during the day and a number of institutions and I know the Minister for Health and Minister for Energy have been in contact with relevant authorities about that,” she said.
“Ausgrid does need to explain what went wrong and why it went wrong and to fix the problem - we know it was an isolated incident but notwithstanding that it’s obviously something we don’t want to see happen again.”
MORE NEWS:
Darren Weir faces ban from racing in NSW
Dark history of MAFS ‘hot brother’ revealed
Desperate triple-0 call from Luke O’Donnell’s mum
An energy industry source said the fault was triggered by weeds that came into contact with a 132 kilovolt power cable where it entered the ground.
An Ausgrid spokeswoman was last night unable to rule out whether a lack of maintenance, such as weed control, was the cause.
More than 45,000 homes and business from Randwick to Clovelly and north to Double Bay were affected including Coogee Public School, which lost all power.
At The Sydney Children’s Hospital, The Royal Hospital for Women and The Prince of Wales Hospital lifesaving equipment such as ventilators were switched to battery power for a full minute after the electricity outage plunged the Randwick campus into darkness.
It took a minute for back-up generators to kick in when the power was cut at 11.26am. Power was restored at 12.30pm.
A mother and her eight-month-old baby were rescued from a lift in Kensington, a man was pulled from a Randwick unit block lift, while five people were freed from a building in Bondi Junction.
Firefighters also rescued several elderly residents at a Randwick aged care home.
Those who tried to escape the scorching temperatures at Randwick Shopping centre were out of luck, with hundreds of people sweltering in the centre when the airconditioning cut out.
There was traffic chaos in the eastern suburbs with 23 sets of traffic lights down for 45 minutes.
Police were required to maintain order on the roads in sweltering heat as temperatures reached 33 degrees.
At the hospitals, nine surgeries were cancelled and ambulance flow was slowed down for an hour.
Sunday Night journalist Alex Cullen was inside The Royal Hospital for Women’s neonatal ward where generators did not start for 30 seconds.
“Doctors came running, doors were slamming everything went off. I asked one of the staff ‘Has this ever happened before?’ She said ‘Never, ever before’,” he told 7 News last night.
A Prince of Wales doctor said power was out for “at least a minute”.
“If the power drops out the backup generators are triggered automatically but this time we would have been out for at least a minute,” he said. “It was certainly longer than you’d want for a blackout.”
He said critically ill patients were supported by battery power.
Health Minister Brad Hazzard personally called the head of the SCH’s neonatal intensive care unit to be assured none of the vulnerable babies had been affected by the outage.
When the power was cut — and switched over to back-up batteries before generators kicked in — alarms sounded throughout the ward, terrifying parents.
“I was assured that all life support equipment including ventilators automatically switched over to the battery back-up and reserve power systems. She said there was not one moment of interruption to services,” Mr Hazzard said.
“It was simply an alarm that (staff) are very aware of because they do emergency drills to be prepared.”
Doctors and nurses volunteered to climb up to 10 flights of stairs to help deliver meals to patients across wards with unpowered lifts.
A Prince of Wales patient said the outage interfered with an ultrasound on her leg.
“When I went into the doctor’s office the machine to do my scan kept turning on and off because there isn’t full power.”
Another patient was furious their brain surgery was rescheduled for the weekend.
“I was supposed to be having a brain operation but the hospital said they can’t risk operating on me because it’s unreliable,” she told The Daily Telegraph. Emergency crews on way to investigate power cut in parts of Bondi, Kensington, Randwick, Bondi Junction.
“The backup generators aren’t strong enough so you can’t go around having this sort of thing happen in a serious place.”
A South Eastern Sydney Local Health district spokeswoman said refrigerated products at the hospitals — such as embryos — were unaffected.
The outage was a day after two coal-fired power stations — Liddell in the Hunter Valley and Eraring in Lake Macquarie suffered broken generators.
Hate-filled nurses are ‘like Sam Kerr’: Islamic leader’s bizarre claim
A Sydney Islamic leader has refused to condemn the nurses at the centre of the vile hate video that has shocked the nation, bizarrely likening them to Matildas captain Sam Kerr.
More pain for train commuters today after late-night wage talks break down
Commuters need to brace themselves for delays on the Sydney rail network this morning after pay negotiations between the Minns government and the rail union stalled late last night.