A burst water pipe has evacuated the fifth floor of the Flin Flon General Hospital, with respirator-clad workers hoping to clean up the damage by next week.
Staff and patients have been moved to other areas of the hospital and, as a precaution, were to be told to watch for symptoms of temporary illness.
“It’s going to be tough because we lost those beds and that space, but (staff) are pretty comfortable that they’ll be able to make due,” said Glenn Hildebrand, spokesperson for the Northern Health Region.
Sealed off
The NHR estimated the fifth floor would be sealed off until about this Monday, Dec. 16, but that was only an initial prediction.
“We figure that losing that much space for the week is probably going to cause us some service disruptions,” Hildebrand said Monday afternoon. “We will expect that and monitor it closely and do our best to mitigate that.”
Hildebrand said the water pipe burst this past Sunday, Dec. 8, and was noticed at about 7 a.m.
By then, he said, “gallons and gallons of water” had escaped, finding its way from the ceiling down to the floor of the hospital’s fifth storey, which houses the obstetrics and post-surgical department.
“Now it’s about making sure everything is clean,” said Hildebrand, referring to the clean-up process. “If there’s anything that was electrical that got wet, there’s a process they have to go through. So...everything is all about caution and not taking anything for granted.”
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The line that burst was a standard water pipe that was not connected to any medical devices.
“It’s a pipe that’s been there for decades that chose to burst (Sunday) morning,” said Hildebrand, who believed the cold weather to be a factor in the mishap.
A team of professionals, complete with respirators, was to be brought in to perform the clean-up, Hildebrand said.
“It’s a hospital and they don’t want to do anything that’s got any risk associated with it if they don’t have to,” he said.
As a precaution, people who were in the immediate area of the burst pipe were to be asked to monitor themselves for symptoms such as fever, cough, shortness of breathe, headache, fatigue and sinus pain.
Hildebrand said the hospital’s infection-control protocol kicks in as soon as a single ceiling tile is disturbed. In this case, a number of tiles are being disturbed.
The fifth floor of the Flin Flon General Hospital has been evacuated after a water pipe burst Sunday.
PHOTO BY JONATHON NAYLOR
