The Ottawa Hospital's Civic Campus is back on full power after a morning electrical fire in a service building.
Ottawa Fire says it was called to the hospital around 9:50 a.m. Friday after staff reported seeing smoke from a high voltage vault in the service area of the building. Upon arrival, crews discovered an "electrical fault" and declared a working fire shortly after to ensure enough firefighters were on scene should the scene escalate.
Fire says flames were never spotted.
Crews with Hydro Ottawa were called to the scene to assist firefighters locate and isolate the electrical circuits.
Hydro Ottawa says the vault and equipment belong to the hospital and as such the hospital's own contractors are on site working to fix the equipment.
The hospital was operating on emergency power for much of the day until "full power" was restored to the civic campus around 5:20 Friday night. It says no patients were affected or evacuated, although some non-emergency surgical procedures and out-patient appointments were cancelled and rescheduled.
"It's a very difficult decision for us to take because we know people do wait and they adjust their lives and they do everything to be ready for these times," said Bernie Etzinger, The Ottawa Hospital's Chief Communications Office." So when we do cancel them, as we did today, it's because precautionary; we needed to have the capacity to make sure that for urgent, trauma cases we would be ready for that under an emergency power situation."
Approximately 12 staff members were temporarily forced to leave their "service building."
Ottawa Paramedics were diverting all non-urgent calls to other hospitals for much of the day to reduce the strain on the hospital. Urgent, life-threatning calls including heart attacks, trauma cases and strokes continued going to the civic campus.
