Continuity & Disaster Recovery Planning Assignment 3

Running head: POWER BLACKOUT 1
POWER BLACKOUT 4

Blackout
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Blackout
On 2019 June 13th, there was a blackout that was experienced in Mount Sinai hospital. It was not planned for, and it scared a lot of staff and patients. Patients were very worried about their lives, and that made them feel unsafe while they were in Mount Sinai hospital. It was a great step to encounter such difficult moments as people were not able to be attended to with quality services. When the power goes off mostly, there is an automatic generator that is supposed to switch immediately to prevent incurring losses and losing lives. It is the reason why most patients were subjected to trauma. Systems were shut down, and there was low continuous checking of progress. The lights went off, so people depended on the generator to assist them all through. Don Boyce was called on that Saturday since he was working for the emergency team in Mount Sinai hospital. The problem was not in the whole of Manhattan but just the hospital. Messages were sent to important people who could be able to assist in the problem that they were facing. Staff was texted via email so that they could log to a conference call to be alerted on the matter that was at hand(Zimmerman et al., 2019).
The team decided to write a priority list that they could address first. The main agenda was to check which parts of the hospital were not functioning even when the generator was working. Many questions were placed into consideration. For example, where the backup outlets working? Was anyone stuck in the elevator? Were all patients, visitors, and staff safe? They moved to the critical and specific work. First, they wanted to check if pumps that preserved life were working quite well. Furthermore, they wanted to know the impact that the power blackout had brought in the sector of medicine and food. That is, if they were compromised in one way or the other. All these meeting and discussion was done in a conference call that later ended and brought a lot of challenges. The good thing was that up to that time, there were no deaths that had been announced and discovered since the occurrence of the power outage(Yuan et al., 2019 November).
The engineers promised that power could be back son before people knew it. However, the emergency team and especially Don Boyce could not take their word for it. He prepared for two days in that the hospital could function well while using the generator as their main and only source of power. The management team was worried about how the staff could arrive at work when the subway was not running. The emergency team decided to arrange for a bus to pick up staff early in the morning so that work should continue running as normal. Another worry was about the air conditioner and the ventilation as the hospital could be so much polluted. Boyce was thinking about what could happen the day after tomorrow and how they could sort things without so much difficulty. He wanted a plan that could cater even after those 72 hours. The next step they wanted to take was to ensure that p[patients were vacated to other Mount Sinai facilities. Other private hospitals also offered to assist them at that time. They could inquire about the number of beds that were available in those facilities so that they could transfer patients to get better treatment. Five hours later, the power returned to the hospital and midtown Manhattan at large. Many health facilities wanted to know that they could be given a step to ensure that they could be prepared if such a situation could occur. Mount Sinai hospital acted as a role model to other organizations on the best step to handle such activities. Their preparation was just exemplary as it was all effective when it was most needed (Power et al., 2019).

References
Power, D., Schäfer, U., Guedeney, P., Claessen, B. E., Sartori, S., Sorrentino, S., … & Dangas, G. D. (2019). Impact of percutaneous closure device type on vascular and bleeding complications after TAVR: a post hoc analysis from the BRAVO‐3 randomized trial. Catheterization and cardiovascular interventions, 93(7), 1374-1381.
Yuan, P., Zhang, Q., Zhang, T., Chi, C., Zhang, X., Li, P., & Gong, X. (2019, November). Analysis and Enlightenment of the Blackouts in Argentina and New York. In 2019 Chinese Automation Congress (CAC) (pp. 5879-5884). IEEE.
Zimmerman, R., Foster, S., González, J. E., Jacob, K., Kunreuther, H., Petkova, E. P., & Tollerson, E. (2019). New York City panel on climate change 2019 report chapter 7: Resilience strategies for critical infrastructures and their interdependencies. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1439(1), 174-229.