KEY POINTS:
Southland Hospital staff were in the dark yesterday when their backup generator failed to kick in during a power cut.
An overly tall truck clipped a low voltage line at the intersection of Tramway and Rockdale roads around 9.41am.
PowerNet Ltd spokesman Roy Duffin told the Southland Times the line broke and flicked up hitting a larger line and causing it to short - cutting power from south Invercargill to Bluff.
At the hospital, a generator which usually switched on within minutes of an outage failed to spring to life, leaving half the building without electricity, Southland District Health Board interim chief operating officer Leanne Samuel said.
Although there were two patients in the surgical theatre at the time and more in the emergency department, Mrs Samuel said nobody was put at risk.
She said all critical equipment had its own backup power supply, which ran off batteries.
Five elective surgeries were postponed as power remained off until 10.30am.
It was not known what went wrong with the generator and the hospital was investigating.
- NZPA
