Health Service chief executive Adrian Pennington reflects on his experiences during the January 2103 floods in a blog on the News-Mail website. The Bundaberg Hospital in Bundaberg, Queensland, Australia was forced to evacuate after severe flooding.
According to Pennington, the hospital monitored river levels on the first day of the flood while medical staff established medical support to the north of Bundaberg.
"The ICU and SCBU were evacuated over the next 24 hours as a precaution to losing electricity and to ensure we had no seriously ill patients if we were forced to evacuate," he wrote.
On the second day, the facility learned that the flood would impact one of its two electricity substations. This required the rehabilitation unit to be evacuated to the medical and surgical wards.
Within 12 hours that substation and the electricity to half the hospital was shut down.
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