A light­ning strike is be­lieved to have caused the pow­er out­age at the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex (EWM­SC) on Thurs­day af­ter­noon, ac­cord­ing to North-Cen­tral Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (NCRHA) chair­man Dr Tim Gopeesingh.

Ef­forts are cur­rent­ly un­der­way to re­con­nect elec­tric­i­ty to the fa­cil­i­ty.

Ear­li­er to­day, so­cial me­dia posts cir­cu­lat­ed claim­ing that the en­tire com­plex, in­clud­ing the In­ten­sive Care Unit (ICU) and High De­pen­den­cy Unit (HDU), which house crit­i­cal­ly ill pa­tients, were in dark­ness fol­low­ing the out­age.

When con­tact­ed, Dr Gopeesingh said of­fi­cials from the T&T Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) in­formed him that the black­out was caused by a light­ning strike on a pow­er line con­nect­ed to the hos­pi­tal.

He con­firmed that gen­er­a­tors were ac­ti­vat­ed and oth­er tem­po­rary mea­sures im­ple­ment­ed, but ad­di­tion­al work was still on­go­ing to re­store full pow­er.

“We in­stalled a new trans­former from T&TEC and thank God that has been func­tion­ing to some ex­tent. With­out that, we would have been in to­tal dark­ness and in to­tal eclipse of elec­tric­i­ty.

“The im­por­tant ar­eas are the ICU, the HDU, and the op­er­at­ing the­atres.

“I’ve been hav­ing some feed­back from the en­gi­neers.”

Pres­i­dent of the T&T Na­tion­al Nurs­es As­so­ci­a­tion (TTNNA) Idi Stu­art said the sit­u­a­tion un­der­scored the dif­fi­cult con­di­tions nurs­es face dai­ly and urged im­me­di­ate sup­port and restora­tion.

“These pa­tients need to be on ven­ti­la­tors and a num­ber of de­vices which need elec­tric­i­ty. Oth­er­wise, the nurs­ing staff has to man­u­al­ly re­sus­ci­tate these pa­tients, and in an en­vi­ron­ment al­ready short of nurs­ing per­son­nel, the nurse has to de­cide who to save.

“So there’s ab­solute­ly no way a hos­pi­tal can op­er­ate with­out elec­tric­i­ty.”