Intermountain Medical Center power outage prompts NICU transports, ambulance diversions

For at least a half hour, the major Murray hospital campus was left with either no power or “minimum emergency” power, an official said.

Intermountain Medical Center lost power Thursday, forcing the major Murray hospital to transport five babies from its neonatal intensive care unit and six mothers in labor to other hospitals for care, an Intermountain Health official said late Thursday afternoon.

A spokesperson with Intermountain Health earlier Thursday had initially said no patients needed to be transported because of the outage. But Chief Nursing Officer Brian Pendleton confirmed the transports during a later news briefing.

The hospital campus first lost power for unknown reasons at about 11:15 a.m. Thursday, Pendleton said, prompting the facility to divert incoming ambulances to other nearby hospitals.

“We immediately activated our emergency response system, and the generator backup came on, but then also we lost that generator power as well,” Pendleton said.

For at least the next half hour, the Murray hospital campus was left with either no power or “minimum emergency” power, Pendleton said. That window is when the laboring mothers and NICU patients were taken to other hospitals.

The hospital’s ventilators are equipped with battery backups, so patients on ventilators didn’t experience interruptions during the outage, he said.

With the help of Murray fire officials and the city, full power had been restored by about 1 p.m., Pendleton estimated late Thursday afternoon. Officials are still working to understand why the hospital lost main power and why its initial generator power failed, he added.

In the meantime, Pendleton said, the hospital is “up and running” but “minimizing” elective surgeries and other nonemergency procedures.

“Luckily, things were able to come back that we did not have a need to transport other patients besides those that I mentioned,” Pendleton said.

The hospital campus appeared to be the only place within the Murray City Power Department’s boundary that experienced a significant outage Thursday afternoon, according to the city’s outage map at the time.

Erica Brown, chief communications officer with the Murray mayor’s office, confirmed Thursday evening that the city is investigating the outage and said she couldn’t immediately comment further.

The Murray hospital campus is home to five interconnected health centers for women’s and newborn care; heart and lung care; emergency and trauma care; outpatient care; and cancer care, according to the hospital’s website.

Several medical helicopters could be seen leaving the Murray hospital Thursday afternoon, bound for facilities including Intermountain’s McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden and its LDS Hospital in the Avenues neighborhood of Salt Lake City, according to flight tracking data. It’s unclear if those flights were connected to any outage-related patient transfers.

Jordan Sorenson, a spokesperson for the Utah Hospital Association, said several hospitals along the Wasatch Front were standing by Thursday, ready to take patients if needed.

He noted all of the babies and people in labor transported from the Murray hospital Thursday were taken to other facilities in Intermountain Health’s system.

State health officials were on standby to assist Intermountain Medical Center with portable power units and help find hospitals for patient transfers, a Utah Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson told The Salt Lake Tribune. But power started coming back online before those state resources were needed.

The state health agency was also coordinating with the Utah Hospital Association, the spokesperson added.

As of about 2 p.m., a Utah Department of Public Safety spokesperson said, Intermountain Health had not requested additional assistance from the state emergency operations center.

— Tribune staff writer Jordan Miller contributed to this report.