MURRAY, Utah — Power has been restored after an outage caused multiple buildings on the Murray campus of the Intermountain Medical Center to go dark Thursday afternoon. However, ambulances are still being diverted to other hospitals until officials are confident the service is fully operational.
According to Intermountain Health, the outage happened just before noon, forcing the complex to run on backup power for critical areas, including surgery, prep rooms, and the intensive care unit.
"we had over 500 patients in our hospital at the time, and we have worked through and have been able to move out just a few patients who needed to be transported out, but the patients all remain here in our hospital," explained Chief Nursing Officer Brian Pendleton.
While Rocky Mountain Power and Murray City Power were able to get the outage fixed, its cause is still not known.
"It's not something we hope for, but definitely something we plan for," Pendleton explained. "We do drill on these types of things and plan for them and prepare so that when it happens, we were able to jump in and have our teams act and respond right away, so that we could minimize the amount of time. And that's what we were able to do today."
Along with ambulances being diverted, all elective surgeries are being postponed until officials determine the stability of the power system.
