JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Power has been restored at the Baptist Medical Center South’s campus after experiencing an outage for the second time in less than 24 hours on Thursday morning.
The emergency backup was used from about 10:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Wednesday when the power went out, according to a statement from the hospital.
A social media post from the hospital just before 8:45 a.m. Thursday announced that the campus was again on backup power.
Just before 10 a.m., the hospital posted that power had been restored.
Primary power has been restored to #BaptistSouth & its medical office buildings. Electrical contractors have isolated the issue, which was a faulty switch, & have made the necessary repairs. We appreciate your patience & apologize for any delays in appts. & elective procedures. pic.twitter.com/lPlnC2rDmi
— Baptist Health (@BaptistHealthJx) September 28, 2023
The power outages forced the hospital to cancel non-essential services until the problem was fixed.
According to Sam Dean who oversees facilities for Baptist Health, an electrical switch that handles high voltage broke and caused the outage. This happened Wednesday, and officials thought it was fixed, but then it went out again Thursday morning.
“At 6:30 this morning we had a fault that occurred. It was in a switch that’s on the primary distribution, and that triggered the shutdown on the primary power,” Dean said.
News4JAX learned that a similar outage occurred last July.
The outpatient surgery center has an emergency backup system, but private offices on campus don’t have emergency power “per industry standards,” the hospital said, so they had to contact patients who had appointments scheduled for Thursday morning.
“If you’re not in imminent danger of whatever it is that you need, those are elective surgeries. So we stopped that until we restored normal power,” Dean said.
But when the power goes out, there is a very short time when things go black before backup power can come on.
“Well, in the operating room, we have even more redundancy, we have battery-powered lights so that he would see some change in the lighting situation for eight seconds. But he would have lights always to do surgery,” Dean said.
The hospital said that during the outage on Wednesday, there was “a very short delay in elevator service” for both the hospital and patient parking garage as the system switched to emergency power. The loss of power also affected elevators in the medical office buildings, and stair chairs were available to transport patients downstairs.
Elevators in the hospital were “fully operational” despite the outage on Thursday.
No one’s safety was at risk during these power outages.