South Peninsula Hospital lost power last Friday, during a series of widespread outages affecting more than 5,000 Homer Electric Association members on the Lower Kenai Peninsula. The utility blamed recent snow and down trees for knocking out power.
The hospital’s backup system failed to activate, prompting staff to set up an incident command center at Homer Medical Center. South Peninsula Hospital’s Public Information Officer Derotha Ferraro said the response is something staff practice on a regular basis.
“Coincidentally, they had just done one in November. They had done a mass casualty drill and had just practiced many of the things that they were able to implement on Friday,” Ferraro said.
That meant finding alternative ways to track patient charts and communicate within the facility.
Ferraro said critical medical equipment continued to operate separately on battery power. But the sporadic outages caused a malfunction in a key component of the hospital’s backup power system.
“So there wasn't the ability for the hospital building system to tell the generator, hey, we're out of power, we need power. So the electronic prompt between the two wasn't happening,” Ferraro said.
Ferraro said Homer Electric Association prioritized restoring power to the hospital as soon as it was notified about the failure. HEA could not be reached for comment in time for the broadcast.
South Peninsula Hospital was back up and running after about an hour and a half. It has since resumed normal operations, and replaced the control unit responsible for engaging the backup generators. Ferraro said the hospital has planned what they call a “brown out” test to ensure the new unit can handle future outages.
The Homer Electric Association outage map shows that power has since also been restored across its network, including to residents and businesses in Seldovia to Nanwalek, as of this Thursday.
