Casan­dra Thomp­son-Forbes

A rup­tured wa­ter line that sup­plies an an­ti-fire sprin­kler sys­tem left staff at the Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal mop­ping up for hours yes­ter­day.

Some ser­vices were tem­porar­i­ly sus­pend­ed af­ter the roof of the main hall­way lead­ing to the wards caved in, caus­ing the area to be flood­ed with wa­ter.

The in­ci­dent oc­curred short­ly af­ter 12 pm in the full view of pa­tients, staff and vis­i­tors at the Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal.

Ques­tioned about the in­ci­dent at the post-Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Sec­re­tary for Health, Well­ness and Fam­i­ly De­vel­op­ment Coun­cil­lor Tra­cy David­son-Ce­les­tine said, she re­ceived in­for­ma­tion from the Med­ical Chief of Staff Dr Vic­tor Wheel­er on what oc­curred.

“Present­ly, ser­vices have been re­stored in that par­tic­u­lar area. The phar­ma­cy is now up and run­ning and is open in­ter­nal­ly to pa­tients and by to­mor­row they will re­sume the ser­vice to those who are out­side the fa­cil­i­ty or out­pa­tients as the case may be. But the wa­ter has been mopped up and the fire wa­ter sys­tem has been dealt with,” she said.

De­scrib­ing the sit­u­a­tion as mi­nor, David­son-Ce­les­tine said while there was some in­con­ve­nience, no one was in­jured dur­ing the in­ci­dent.

She said par­tial ser­vice re­sumed to the pub­lic with­in one hour.

“These are nor­mal parts of op­er­a­tions, lines will break, equip­ment will stop func­tion­ing af­ter a pe­ri­od of time. There is a main­te­nance plan in place at the hos­pi­tal and all of our health fa­cil­i­ties and with­in short or­der, based on the re­port I would have re­ceived, with­in one hour they were able to treat with the sit­u­a­tion in a par­tic­u­lar way, the mop­ping up would have start­ed, as I would have in­di­cat­ed, the phar­ma­cy ser­vice would have re­sumed and no one was in­jured, be­cause it was ba­si­cal­ly wa­ter com­ing through from the roof,” she said.

Nor­mal op­er­a­tions will re­sume at the Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal to­day.