Patients under siege as Marina 'blacks out'

MONKAGEDI GAOTLHOBOGWE
Staff Writer | Friday April 13, 2012 00:00

 

Medical workers fled the darkness and hid in one corner while patients struggled for dear life in the dark wards.

Mmegi can confirm that the front back-up generator failed to work at the facility, placing the patients at high risk of death as power outages rocked Gaborone.

The Mmegi team observed that only the eastern generator was working, providing power to wards at the far end of the hospital, including the mortuary.

As outages continued for hours throughout the night, there were fears for the lives of pregnant women who were about to deliver as well as for patients on life support in the ICU.

Victims of road accidents in the emergency wards were also fighting for dear life as the power cuts went unabated. Visitors could be seen struggling to locate their sick relatives in the dark wards as some frantically used cellphones to illuminate their way.

During the first outage, which lasted for more than an hour, the front back-up generator supporting the maternity, accidents and emergency wards as well as the ICU failed to work. Hardly 15 minutes later the hospital was hit by another outage as the blackouts around the city continued.

Mmegi witnessed one ugly scene where a patient alleged to have been in a road accident was pushed in a trolley from the dark emergency room by police officers and some ununiformed people looking for medical workers to help her.

The Mmegi team could not locate any official at the hospital to immediately comment on the situation. 

The Assistant Minister of Health, Gaothaetse Matlhabaphiri said the  hospital's superintendent, Vincent Molelekwa, told him that initially both generators failed to fire when the blackouts started, but that later the eastern generators started running while the generator controlling power at the emergency wards failed completely.

Matlhabaphiri said the hospital superintendent further told him that he informed the Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) to restore power to the facility, the busiest in the country, because their generators were not working.