A partial power outage of more than three hours at Cleveland Clinic Indian River Hospital on a partly-cloudy Thursday afternoon in June served as a dry run for hurricane season, and a reminder of the costly infrastructure required to keep Vero’s hospital running rain or shine – including an upcoming new $90 million power plant.
The June 19 outage was logged in by FP&L at 2:38 p.m. when an electrical switching box reportedly caught fire and sent a surge up toward the hospital’s “chiller” which drives the air-conditioning in the main hospital building.
“During the recent power outage, patients in the hospital experienced a temporary change in temperature as backup systems activated cooling procedures. The effectiveness of the preparedness measures implemented ensured continuous patient care despite external issues impacting the existing infrastructure,” hospital Vice President and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Richard Rothman said.
“This situation verified that the plans are functional, and that care can be maintained through various external factors, including natural disasters and other causes of outages,” he added.
Rothman was on-site during the outage, spoke to a top FP&L executive on the phone, and said he was pleased with the utility’s response.
“Florida Power & Light promptly arrived on-site to address the issue. The adjacent ambulatory services building was unaffected and continued seeing patients without interruption. Our comprehensive emergency preparedness protocols enabled Cleveland Clinic Indian River Hospital to continue providing patient care throughout the incident,” Rothman said.
FP&L spokesman Kamrel Eppinger said the repair crew found no external impact damage to the switching box, so nothing crashed into it or fell on it, no evidence of a lightning strike, and no critters inside. “The cause is still unknown,” he said.
Just before 6 p.m., FP&L had replaced the whole switching box with a new one, and the chiller component which failed secondary to the switching box fire had also been replaced.
“By evening, the power had been fully restored, and all in-hospital operations returned to normal,” Rothman said. “Cleveland Clinic Indian River Hospital has worked collaboratively with FP&L and engineers to test and maintain the legacy power plant, ensuring appropriate redundancy. These layers of redundancy ensure effective backups in the unlikely scenario that they are required.”
The hospital has been repairing and replacing portions of its backup power system as situations arise, such as a new backup generator installed mid-storm last October during Vero’s brush with Hurricane Milton.
In January on a tour of the hospital, Rothman showed Vero Beach 32963 the current power plant and natural gas backup generators housed in a semi-trailer, but a new, modern power and generator system will pull together decades of additions to Vero’s nearly 50-year-old hospital.
According to county property records, the five-story hospital building spans 377,000 square feet of heated area and has been added onto 10 times since 1978.
“The complete replacement of the legacy power plant is estimated to cost $90 million.
Construction will be phased over the next few years,” Rothman said. “It’s one of the many investments in things the public never sees.”
Photos by Joshua Kodis
