In a scene that played out like a script from NBC's television drama "ER," a Veterans Affairs hospital recently averted disaster thanks in part to a well-rehearsed Y2K emergency plan.
On the night of Nov. 23, a power surge in the VA Medical Center in Miami, Fla., caused a short in the building's main electrical panel. The short caused a fire that melted wires that distribute power to the rest of the hospital.
Jack Hetrick, associate director of the hospital, was doing some after-work errands at Home Depot when he was notified about the outage. Power was lost to all passenger elevators in the main building and the lights were out in most places, Hetrick was informed. Meanwhile, doctors were in the midst of an open-heart surgery procedure.
"I had to rely on remembering our emergency plan," Hetrick said. Luckily, that emergency plan had been drilled in to his memory through months of preparation for potential Y2K-related disasters.
"We had been practicing for a long time," Hetrick said. One exercise that became particularly useful was on what to do if the automatic backup power system didn't work. When that happened, hospital employees knew they had to make the switch manually. "Our Y2K exercises helped us be completely up to date on those practices," Hetrick said.
Surgeons finished the open heart procedure with flashlights, Hetrick said, and no patients were hurt during the emergency. In fact, the hospital was back up and running within five days of the event, despite estimates that it would take a month to recover from the fire.
Now hospital officials are gearing up for the actual event they were preparing for. The night of the fire, "we tried things that we had never done before and it worked," Hetrick said. Still, the Miami VA hospital isn't leaving anything to chance. "All medical devices have been tested and certified," Hetrick said.
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