Healthcare facilities are experiencing a level of disruption to delivering care and running their businesses that they have never seen as a result of the California wildfires and Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s planned blackouts, according to an article on the Sacramento Bee website.
“I actually have never experienced a power outage where we were on emergency generator backup for 40 hours or more,” Dr. Brian Evans, the chief executive officer at Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital in Grass Valley, said in the article.
PG&E set up utility-scale generators at one of its utility substations in the Grass Valley area, creating a "continuity zone" that is supplying electricity to 3,800 customers, including the hospital.
Across California, wildfires and outages have forced healthcare providers to close hospitals and medical clinics, or greatly limit services. Both Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health evacuated their hospitals in Santa Rosa, the second time in three years the medical centers had to be abandoned
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