An electrical fire in a mechanical room at Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH) on Friday morning caused close to $1 million in damages, according to Barrie fire officials.
Deputy chief Carrie Clark told BarrieToday that fire investigators have deemed the cause as accidental, adding the origin was electrical.
“We are pegging the damage between $750,000 and $1 million,” she said.
Cathy Clark, RVH’s director of safety, security and occupational health, told BarrieToday that it appears a spark occurred when contractors were on site to disconnect and remove an old, non-operational generator on the hospital's fifth floor, and that is what ignited the blaze.
The fifth floor is a mechanical area and does not contain any patients, she noted, however an in-patient unit on the fourth floor did sustain some water damage due to the sprinklers going off.
“There was water that leaked through due to the activation of the sprinklers and that has leaked through to a patient unit directly below," Cathy Clark said. "All 21 patients have been successfully moved to two other units and that occurred quite rapidly. Those patients are all being cared for now in those other units.
“There were, happily, no injuries to patients, no injuries to staff or emergency responders," she added.
Cathy Clark said hospital officials do not believe there was any structural damage, but they had yet been able to conduct a full assessment.
“The patient area floor on the fourth floor, there doesn’t appear to be any structural damage there either, but there has been ceiling damage in a relatively small area (and) it doesn’t take a lot of water coming through the ceiling to cause a bit of a mess," she said.
Carrie Clark, meanwhile, said the mechanical room where the fire occurred needs to be remediated for the smoke, water and diesel as well as other products of combustion, noting RVH had a crew on site to start that work right away.
Anytime a fire involves electricity, things can get tricky, the deputy chief explained
“It is always an intricate fire when you have electricity and water involved. The fuel source causes toxic black smoke, so the environment was hostile when they got there," she said. "They have different techniques when handling electrical fires to protect them from the electricity coming back through the water lines
“They implemented those techniques until such time that the power could be isolated to that area and the electricity could be made.”
Although the fire may not have occurred on a patient floor, Carrie Clark said firefighters always have it in the back of their minds that there are people throughout the building who could be impacted.
“When a hospital goes into a fire alarm there are people in different spots and levels of vulnerability. … There are several safety systems built into hospitals and locations that have this occupant load situation going on and those are regularly practiced by staff for them to react to what they call a Code Red," she said.
“When fire crews arrive it’s always in the back of their mind that there are vulnerable people here, but hospital staff are executing their training to identify the area of hazard and move people away from that area to safer parts of the hospital," the deputy chief added. "They are doing that simultaneously to fire crews going to where the fire is.
"It may seem like chaos on the outside, but it is a well-oiled machine on the inside.”
RVH has a full emergency response plan, including a plan for both internal evacuations within the hospital, as well a plan for a full external evacuation, said Cathy Clark.
“We have an emergency operations centre team that meets in these types of emergency situations to rapidly assess the situation and make decisions about our response," she said.
Aside from relocating the 21 patients from the floor directly below where the fire occurred, Cathy Clark said the fire will not impact operations at RVH any further.
“We have other operational generators that are connected to the building, so we don’t have any risk of loss of power, or any other operational impacts at this time.”
