A roughly 13-hour power outage disrupted medical care for roughly 100 patients at Soldotna’s Central Peninsula Hospital on Friday. The hospital reported that ice damage to an underground utility line cut power to the hospital’s River Tower late Thursday night. Power was restored Friday around 1 p.m.
The River Tower will resume normal operation starting Monday. Shanon Davis is the hospital’s marketing manager. She says the hospital’s River Tower is not a place where patients stay overnight.
“The River Tower is considered our medical office building, and so it is populated mostly with our clinics,” Davis said. “Also our oncology department is located in the River Tower, and we are the home to Peninsula Radiation Oncology, so they provide radiation services for our cancer patients.”
Davis says roughly 100 patients were impacted by the outage. Some were diverted to neighboring hospital buildings, like the Mountain Tower and the Binkley building. Patients whose appointments could not be relocated were contacted by the hospital directly to reschedule.
According to a hospital press release, staff worked with Central Emergency Services and Homer Electric Association to restore power. When the hospital experiences a major incident like Friday’s outage, Davis says alarms at the hospital trigger a response from CES, which works closely with the hospital.
