Parts of a Northern California hospital were without power Tuesday night after backup generators failed during a historic heat wave.
Santa Clara Valley Medical Center (SCVMC), part of the County of Santa Clara Health System, said in a statement that the blackout lasted for approximately four hours at “a few” of its buildings.
“Our emergency plans went into place immediately, and patient safety was never compromised,” the public system said in a statement provided to Fierce Healthcare. “At no time were patients put into life-threatening situations.”
The system said it closed SCVMC’s emergency department to stroke, heart attack, trauma and ambulance arrivals as part of the response. Seven patients were transferred to other facilities while another nine were shifted to a different location at SCVMC. The outage had “no significant impact” on the hospital’s blood bank or blood supply.
The San Francisco Bay Area, much like other parts of California, has been under a “record-breaking” excessive heat warning since last week. San Jose reached a high of 109 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday.
Utility providers have warned of outages while the governor’s office announced emergency measures and urged residents to conserve energy.
Both SCVMC and O’Connor Hospital, a sister facility, were impacted by a power outage from 6:30 p.m. Tuesday to 1:40 a.m. Wednesday reportedly caused by a substation failure, the system said.
Backup generators immediately kicked in at O’Connor and for “most of SCVMC” until their failure about two hours into the outage, according to the statement.
Physicians speaking to local media described transporting patients from an uncharacteristically quiet intensive care unit by the light of their smartphones.
“Patients on ventilators are on the ventilators running on batteries that only last about 30 minutes. Patients who have drips running for medicine, those will only last about an hour," Tiffany Chao, M.D., a surgeon at SCVMC, told a local ABC affiliate. "So, we have about 30 minutes to evacuate the entire ICU to another part of the hospital before we're going to have to start ventilating patients by hand … meaning someone would have to stay at the bedside, doing the ventilation and the breathing for the patients."
SCVMC said the backups were restored at 12:30 a.m., just over an hour before the end of the broader blackout.
Still, “some elective procedures scheduled for Wednesday were canceled due to uncertainty about how long [utility provider Pacific Gas and Electric company’s] power outage would last,” the system said.