A power outage overnight at White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles prompted the evacuation of more than 200 patients from a building housing neonatal intensive care and OBGYN units, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department and hospital officials.
All patients are safe, including a baby who was born after the hospital's main, six-story building lost power during Tropical Storm Hilary and generators subsequently failed, Adventist Health White Memorial President John Raffoul said at a news conference Tuesday morning.
Doctors and nurses used flashlights to illuminate the room while the mother gave birth, Grace Hauser, a spokesperson for the hospital, said. Mother and baby were transferred to another hospital.
White Memorial first lost its main power early Monday at "the height" of the storm before its backup generators failed around 1 a.m. local time on Tuesday, Raffoul said. Hilary struck Southern California on Sunday as a tropical storm, bringing heavy rain and flooding before it weakened to a post-tropical cyclone.
LAFD responded to find 241 patients were impacted by the outage, 28 of whom were considered critical and moved to other hospitals, Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said at the news conference. Other patients were moved to another building on the hospital's campus that still had power, Raffoul added.
LA City Fire Capt. Cody Weireter previously said 271 patients, 21 of them critical, were affected.
"LAFD firefighters and paramedics had to work in a coordinated effort to transport (patients) down the stairs and the stairwells to awaiting ambulances," Weireter said in an earlier news conference.
The failure of the backup generators will be investigated, Raffoul said, adding an emergency generator is being brought to the hospital in the meantime. Regular maintenance and testing are done on the trio of backup generators, he said, but he did not know when that testing had last occurred.
