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Nova Scotia Health says all surgeries will resume Friday at the Centennial building of the Victoria General Hospital complex.
The health authority gave its first interview Thursday afternoon about the problems at the aging Halifax hospital, after a decades-old transformer malfunctioned and knocked out the power in all the buildings on the site just before midnight last Friday.
Derek Spinney, the vice-president of corporate services and chief financial officer of Nova Scotia Health, said one of two transformers at the hospital malfunctioned and turned itself off.
“When that happened, it ended up causing a lot of the breakers in the different buildings to turn themselves off.”
The breakers to the backup generators also turned off, leaving the entire complex in the dark.
While the power was restored within several hours using the remaining transformer on-site, the Centennial building was left with no backup, forcing the hospital to reschedule surgeries or move them off-site.
The transformers are original equipment installed in 1967 when the Centennial building opened, Spinney said.
“Is the site old? We all know that,” he said. “Everybody will look forward to a day when we have new facilities. But that’s the progress that we’re in right now so obviously the new tower at the [Halifax Infirmary] is going to be extremely useful.”
But Spinney said they had no concerns about the condition of the equipment before last week’s incident.
“All of our equipment is visited every day as we go through so there was nothing to tell us that there was about to be a problem.”
Spinney said maintenance workers on-site quickly identified the issue and started manually turning the breakers back on.
They also called Nova Scotia Power, asking to be put on a secondary power feed that bypassed the transformer.
“Some rooms had power immediately, and other ones took three to four hours till we found the right breaker in order to be able to turn them back on.”
The outage also knocked out the main phone lines, leaving staff to work with “red phones,” which are the landlines that remain on each floor.
The phone company had to be called in to replace the phone equipment. Spinney said the lines were restored around 6:30 p.m. on Saturday.
A temporary transformer — a 1989 model transferred from another location — has now been installed at the Centennial, but Spinney said two new transformers will have to be purchased, and that process will take months.
Nova Scotia Health said it’s too soon to say how much that will cost.
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