Flood at Hamilton's St. Joseph's Hospital 0:15
Flood at Hamilton's St. Joseph's Hospital 0:15
A massive cleanup continues at St. Joseph's Hospital as crews work to repair damage while at the same time trying to get as much of the interrupted services back online.
Before 7 a.m. on Wednesday, a pipe on an emergency fire hose exploded on the second floor of the hospital, spewing a torrent of water into the hallway.
The flood shuttered 12 operating rooms — forcing St. Joe's to cancel all surgeries until Saturday — and closed the emergency department to all patients except those who could walk in under their own power.
Occurring in the early hours of the day, the rupture didn't come to the attention of hospital brass until 20 minutes after it occurred, while water was still streaming from the breach.
"Calls began to come in from all over the hospital. 'There's water coming in through the ceilings and down through the walls,' " recalled Dr. David Higgins, president of St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton.
He shared the account on Sunday while he and other St. Joe's officials gave a tour of the hospital's surgical and emergency departments to members of the media.
The following pictures from the visit shine a light on the scale of the damage as well as the immense, yet intricate cleanup job that's underway.
The glass case under the tarp contains the pipe that sprung a leak. (If you watch the cell phone video at the top of the page, you can see how forcefully water cascaded into the hallway.)
The hose is connected to the hospital's sprinkler system, which has safeguards in place that prevented staff from turning off the water immediately, Higgins said.
Brightly coloured enclosures of this kind are not a common sight in the water-damaged parts of the hospital.
"We have to wall off anything that's damaged or wet," said Higgins. "As staff begin to work on it and take it apart, we want to make sure there isn't any dust or contamination in the institution."
The flood started in a hallway that leads to a waiting area and observation rooms for individuals going into surgery. As water washed in through archways and under doors, staff hustled to move medical gear to dry ground.
The photo above shows nurses rolling equipment that survived the flood into rooms that have been deemed safe for use.
"Staff's efforts, as you can see, were remarkable," said Kevin Smith, CEO of the St. Joseph's Health System. "A whole lot of equipment, if it had stayed in place, would have been damaged beyond repair."
Officials aren't certain how much technology was damaged or destroyed during the incident.
However, Higgins noted he "can confidently say that staff saved millions of dollars worth of equipment in a very short time.
"People were soaked to the skin working in here, moving stuff and moving patients. It was something to be seen."
The emergency department, located below where the flood began, is one of the worst affected areas on the hospital.
At the time of the incident, "we had 50 patients in the ER, approximately 50 patients in ER beds, including the waiting room and patients who were sick waiting for beds," said Higgins.
As water began pouring down the walls and through the ceiling, ER nurses and doctors had to react quickly, he said. "We had to admit about 35 people and move them to beds to be cared for within minutes."
About 60 per cent of the emergency department remained closed on Sunday. The ER has been open to walk-in patients since Thursday, and it is are now accepting ambulances carrying obstetric and hip-fracture patients. But most ambulances continue to be redirected to other Hamilton hospitals.
When will the St. Joe's ER be taking in its normal volume of ambulances? Higgins isn't certain.
"You can see we have work to do. I have to give you a vague answer because we just don't know exactly yet. Our goal is within days. Will we achieve that? I don't know."
Mary Ann Breitigam, manager of redevelopment at St. Joseph's, stands in the hospital's medical equipment reprocessing department. Her hairnet and gown hint how crucial cleanliness and hygiene are in this part of the hospital — after all, it's where of surgical tools are sterilized and then stored again for future use.
But Wednesday's flood made a mess of this highly controlled environment.
"By the end of Wednesday, [the floor] was covered in water and ceiling tile that had collapsed," said Breitigam. "We had to go out and literally buy shovels to pick up the ceiling tiles that had collapsed on the floor."
The flood closed twelve surgical suites. Four reopened Saturday and Higgins said a day later that another two were ready. As of Sunday, St. Joe's was performing some emergency and urgent surgeries.
This photograph illustrates some of the measures the hospital must implement in order to rid the operating rooms of moisture and contaminants — factors that, if left to fester, could lead to deadly infections. Crews have deployed a network of tentacle-like clear tubes and HEPA filters help improve the air quality.
Having cleaned up most of the obvious puddles of water, staff have turned to the trickier task of hunting for moisture that isn't necessarily visible to the naked eye. St. Joe's building manager Tomasz Bielecki, pictured above, holds a thermal spectrometer, which uses infrared technology to pump out a visualization of the temperature of a particular surface. When seen through the device, an otherwise invisible wet spot might appear greener or bluer — suggesting it is cooler — than the area that surrounds it.
Yes, that is a boot. It belongs to a contractor who is performing repairs inside the ceiling of the hospital's emergency department. Unsurprisingly, water can trickle into some very hard-to-reach places.
A sign lying on a stretcher in the hospital's post-anesthesia care unit signals that the bed is ready to use. As sections of St. Joseph's reopen, officials are working on how they can take pressure off hospitals that have taken in extra patients in the wake of the flood.
"We've created capacity upstairs in our medical rooms to receive patients from Hamilton Health Sciences as if they were in St. Joe's," said Higgins. "So the emergency doctors and nurses there will say, 'I have a patient with pneumonia.' And the patient then will come to us and will be admitted, kind of bypassing our emergency department, to try to create some capacity in the system."
A big part of the trouble of repairing the hospital, he said, is doing it while trying to run the rest of facility as smoothly and as normally as possible.
"It's kind of like rebuilding an airplane while you're flying it," said Higgins, who added the cost of the cleanup won't be known for a while.
The exercise has forced hospital staff to think about how they can get back to providing full service while a large hunk of the facility is still out of commission.
The process, Smith hopes, will result in at least a few silver linings.
"It may allow us to say, 'Could we provide the same amount of services with, maybe even better, if we had less space?' " he said.
"We sure don't wish this was the way we got there. But, you know, adversity sometimes breeds innovation."
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