The power outage Sunday at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre is the most serious of some 23 or more power collapses faced by the hospital just this year. It was barely a month ago that Hydro CEO Anthony Haines told the Ontario Energy Network gathering that Sunnybrook “needs a new power line into the hospital.” That urgency will be underscored again by this week’s outrage in which the hospital had to immediately transfer six neonatal infants to other hospitals to gain the extra margin of safety provided by being on the Hydro grid. Of course the hospital has five powerful diesel generators to pick up the load but it is the last backstop to a health-care disaster. Speaking in November Haines said “Our friends at Sunnybrook (Hospital) have had 23 outages this year.” He said outages were made of up 13 outright interruptions, plus another 10 incidents when the quality of power “sagged.” Hospital equipment is especially sensitive to even momentary interruptions, he said: “One sixtieth of a second takes an MRI machine down.” Power interruptions cause delays as equipment has to be shut down and re-booted, he said.
