NCRHA CEO: Efforts to prevent another EWMSC power outage

NORTH Central Regional Health Authority (NCRHA) CEO Davlin Thomas said the RHA is working to prevent a recurrence of the power outage on Monday at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex (EWMSC), Mt Hope.

Some 16 hours after electricity went, the authority resolved the issue of a transformer failure which it said was the reason behind the outage. The incident took place around midday on Monday after recent work was done on the transformer.

By 4.35 am on Tuesday, the supply was transferred to another transformer, fully restoring power to the hospital.

In a release, the authority said on discovering the failure of the transformer, the RHA's incident response team, along with the EWMSC's engineering staff, with support from T&TEC, responded by transferring the supply to a contingency electrical transformer.

As a precautionary measure, non-essential and non-critical services were load-shedded to mitigate any potential problems in emergency areas. All critical ICU patients were transferred to the Arima Hospital.

Thomas said in recent years, the NCRHA had made significant efforts to upgrade the electrical systems at the hospital, at a cost of over $11 million.

This included replacing feeder cables, upgrading electrical substation protection, installing new switch gears and additional emergency electrical enhancements. These proactive measures were implemented to minimise risks and optimise response capacities in case of unforeseen circumstances.

He told Newsday, “The transition to the generators might sometimes not be as smooth ,given that it takes some time, but we will be pursuing further upgrades.

"We have two switch gears to instal – very expensive new equipment – which we bought through the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Finance. We should be installing one of those on July 16, and we have another installation for which we are setting a date.”