A Josh Blog!
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.
8:02am, I pushed the heavy 450 amp 3 phase breaker down. It
was go time. For the next 15 minutes, it was like when you shake the
ant farm, everyone running around yelling in a full-on panic to get the
wires off the walls and into the backup generator. 19 minutes later,
"SNAP" the breaker comes back on and electricity floods the critical
areas of the hospital. Sorry the rest of you all, you'll be down for
the next 7 hours. The pandemonium died down a bit and we could then work
without knowing people were literally holding their breaths. We worked
methodically, installing everything according to the plan for the next 5
hours. Everything went about as smooth as could be expected.
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...
