Greene County Medical Center Losses Power to Portion of Campus Sunday, Community Partners React to Help

Portions of the Greene County Medical Center lost power for a few hours on Sunday.

CEO Chad Butterfield says the loss of power only impacted the older sections of the campus, starting at 2:30pm when the Facilities Team was immediately notified and they began troubleshooting the issue. He emphasizes that at no time was the Emergency Room, Acute, Radiology, as well as Surgical or Laboratory Departments ever lost power. He notes that the safety of all Acute patients were never at risk or anyone else that was utilizing ER services.

Butterfield points out that after the Facilities Team determined that there were no obvious issues that they could identify, electricians with Drees Company were brought in to help. He tells Raccoon Valley Radio the medical center has a generator that would automatically engage whenever there is an interruption of electrical service coming into their buildings. 

Butterfield details that the loss of power on Sunday was not from a source coming into the medical center, it was an internal issue that had to be corrected. He states the generator, therefore, did not trigger to start, nor did it engage to resolve the issue. Butterfield says power was restored by about 8:30pm on Sunday and the Facilities and Nutritional Service Teams stayed into late on Sunday monitoring the situation when all operations returned to normal at 7am Monday morning. 

On behalf of the medical center, Butterfield thanks the different community partners, from the Greene County Sheriff’s Office, the Jefferson Fire Department, Fareway Foods and the Greene County Cattlemen’s Association for their assistance with refrigerated vehicles to minimize the loss of food and he looks forward to the opportunity to return the efforts that these groups showed them. He also thanks all of the medical center team members that drill for various scenarios, such as losing power, and everyone handled the situation well.