The Department of Infrastructure Development wishes to set the record straight regarding the power outage experienced at Charlotte Maxeke academic hospital’s blocks 1 and 5 on Wednesday 19 December 2012.
The outage was not due to a failure of any of the Department’s generators that are currently installed at the hospital.
Our maintenance team at the hospital isolated the problem and attributed it to a general electrical reticulation weakness, which is in turn linked to overloading of the electrical system at blocks 1 and 5.
The ageing electrical infrastructure (Including wiring, circuit boards and UPS) is not coping with this overloading, and the problem has been brought to the attention of the client department (Health). DID, working with the Department of Health, have prioritised reticulation upgrades at Charlotte Maxeke to ensure seamless delivery of quality healthcare regardless of grid power availability.
DID is confident that the generators installed at Charlotte Maxeke are well maintained, and would kick in, in the event of a grid power failure, which was not the case yesterday. The Department of Infrastructure Development is currently engaged in a massive programme, dubbed Project 274, to upgrade all electro-mechanical infrastructure in the province’s health care facilities.
The project worth more than R400 Million entails the upgrade and replacement of ageing equipment such as boilers, chillers, autoclaves, lifts and generators.
Project 274 has already begun bearing fruits, with new boilers, generators and lifts at various phases of installation at health care facilities across the province, including the 4 central hospitals Charlotte Maxeke, Chris Hani Baragwanath, Steve Biko and Dr George Mukhari.
Enquiries:
Thulasizwe Simelane
Cell: 081 031 3518
E-mail: Thulasizwe.Simelane@gauteng.gov.za
