By Beacon Staff
Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center lost primary power for about three hours and 40 minutes Wednesday (May 11), but the outage did not impact patient care.
John Mercer, director of facilities at Great River Health, said the backup generator immediately kicked on, providing power to the most critical parts of the hospital involving patient care.
“We have many areas of the hospital that we have to have on backup power,” he said.
Mercer said the cause was an equipment malfunction.
“We had an issue inside of our main switchgear, which is where the main power comes into the facility,” he said. “We had a wire that came into contact with the switching mechanism.”
By 7:30 p.m. Wednesday night, power had been fully restored. Mercer said power outages do occur on occasion, though it’s usually an issue outside of the hospital.
“This happened to be right where the internal met the external, in the switchgear. It’s not very common, but it does happen,” he said.
Mercer said there have been no lingering problems from the outage.
“We tested all of our systems to make sure everything is operating properly. And everything is,” Mercer said. “There were no adverse patient events. No one was harmed. And that is always our goal.”