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Joint Commission investigates California hospital after power failure

Emergency Management Alert, March 11, 2008

Is it power outage month at EMA?

Seems like. Or it could be the weather. At any rate, The Joint Commission is investigating how administrators at Sacramento's Mercy General handled a power failure that may have left some surgery patients and their doctors in the dark during a massive storm in January. Surveyors made an unannounced visit to the hospital in early February to review the hospital's actions during the storm, which left an estimated 370,000 customers in the Sacramento region without power.

Highlights of the story:

 Elective surgeries and other non-emergency operations were not canceled during the storm because the hospital had two sources of power.

 During the storm, hospital administrators decided to switch their main source of power to their own generators and use as backup the power supplied by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. Said an administrator, "Once the severity of the storm had passed, the decision was made to switch back to SMUD as the main source of power." But then a circuit breaker tripped in the hospital's outpatient unit in the nearby Mercy Medical Plaza, where three surgical procedures were under way.

Here's the Sacramento Bee account of the event.

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