When's the last time you sent in your payment for your electricity bill to your local hospital? In America no one would expect the local hospital to provide their power much less water, housing, lawn care, maintenance, bottled water...you name it. In Africa, a lot of times a hospital will be given a large piece of land in a remote location, sometimes because they are leper colonies or simply because that's the next available plot. Since the hospital is now the only thing in the area, it acts as both a hospital and an infrastructure for its employees and patients. Over time, newcomers flock to the area to provide services to the hospital, and before you know it, the hospital is now under the burden to provide infrastructure for everyone.
Such is the case in Mbingo. The hospital provides power to about two thirds of the entire city, some 150+ buildings. The hospital grid consumes as much as 160,000 Watts of power with over $10,000 a month in electricity bills. As is true in most of the world the power demands continue to increase at an alarming rate. Every month we use 1% more power than the month before. The utility company can't keep up with the current load much less with growth. What happens when the power goes out? People die. It has been the case numerous times when a hospital loses power and patients are on a respirator or oxygen, the machine simply runs out of backup power and the patient passes. Mbingo has a backup generator which runs about 10% of the time annually. It will automatic power the load when the utility goes down in under 10 seconds in critical areas.
In my last blog, I talked about my one month project to do an electrical load study with fellow electrical engineer Hannah Peterson. During our investigation we discovered a handful of issues that could easy become catastrophic in short order. While Hannah returned to the US, I stayed and attempted to do one project after another to help patch the situation until a more permanent solution could be put into place. Without going into too much detail, there existed a chance that two events could coincide (maybe 1 in 10) that could do a large amount of damage to our generator and potentially to all the electrical devices plugged in. Since we have hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical equipment, I figured that while practically unlikely, the risk was too large to ignore and thus it needed to be resolved. I honestly was very nervous about the whole project. I was told that the project must be done as quickly as possible otherwise patients would die. So how do you rewire an entire hospital distribution room with only having the power out for 15 minutes max? I spent two solid weeks designing a solution in CAD, precutting and bending all the cables with my new favorite electrician Nelson, and acquiring all the materials including cable, breakers, meters, timers, relays, terminators, backup generator and lots of tools. I ran as much by Hannah as possible and felt pretty confident by the time the cut over date rolled around.
We decided to make the date of the install on a Sunday morning when there was the least amount of activity. I didn't know how much support I was going to get from the electrical department on the cut over day but when I got there, I was blown away by the 17 electricians who were prepped and ready to go an hour before the deadline. I went through the detailed procedure I had come up with and sent everyone to their positions throughout the hospital. I told them, when you see the lights go out, you go as fast as you can to get your part done. When your done, come back and report so we can be down as short a time as possible.
But then, it was time to bring the critical ICU, OR and wards back over to the new system. We ran around and let everyone know that we were cutting back over and to expect the power to be out. "SNAP!" It was go time again and the riot returned. This time there was a real sense of urgency after 32 minutes passed and we still had 2 breakers left. A nurse came running up to the generator house in tears. "TURN THE POWER BACK ON! MY PATIENT IS TURNING BLUE!" Oh the thoughts that run through your head. First of all this can't be. We planned everything. There is O2 canisters next to every bed, battery backups on everything, we told them it would be down for 3 hours and its only been 32 minutes... The first question collectively was, "why aren't you using the O2 canisters next to the bed?" She replied, "we don't have a mask". WHAT!? "Go get a mask!" She runs off, gets a mask, and the patient was fine. I still haven't figured out why that wasn't obvious in the first place when the masks are clearly right there. Anyway, 8 minutes later we are finished, clicked the power over and everything ran perfectly. We put the system through a series of tests including failing over to the generator and back and it worked exactly like it was supposed to. Relief. The hospital administrator showed up (in his tuxedo by the way). My first thought was oh no did someone die? I asked him straight out and he laughed and said, "no, no one died". He took the whole team out to lunch, took our orders and even served us food like a waiter. We all apologized to each other for our snippiness during those tense moments. There were high fives all around and everyone really felt like they accomplished something.
Before:
After:
Onto the next project...
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