It was 1:30 in the morning. A woman had come to the hospital in early labor. Under heavy anesthesia, she lay on the hospital table, her abdomen surgically opened as the surgery team began the C-section delivery of her baby.
That’s when the lights went out.
In the darkness, the nurses groped for flashlights and head lamps. Someone tried to turn on the back-up generator. Without electricity the phones didn’t work, so staff could not call for help.
Dr. Andy Bennett posted on his blog this photo of
conditions in which medical staff are often forced to
conduct surgeries and other procedures since a
flood destroyed their hydroelectric dam.
While the medical team scrambled, the lights flickered on. They rapidly finished the baby’s delivery and both mother and child came through fine.
However, “it could have been disastrous,” wrote Dr. Becky Wallace, who described the Aug. 31 incident at Kudjip Nazarene Hospital, Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea, on her missionary blog. “We were so thankful for the help of a good team and the mercy from the Lord to have the good turnout we did.”
For the doctors and nurses at Kudjip Nazarene Hospital, conducting medical procedures and surgeries in the dark has become a feared but common occurrence since the hospital’s hydroelectric dam was destroyed by an unprecedented local flood in March.
Estimated at $1.3 million USD, the rebuild project will include a new dam and hydroelectric power plant, a new series of gates that divert river water through a canal to the plant, and a back-up generator, said Dr. Bill McCoy, hospital administrator.
A March flood destroyed this water gate, which is part of
Kudjip Nazarene Hospital's hydroelectric dam. Photo
courtesy Bill McCoy.
The 96-bed hospital is trying to raise $400,000 through denominational givers, and the rest through government and non-government organization (NGO) grants. Once all the funds are raised, it will take about 14 months to complete the entire power system rebuild, according to a project proposal estimate.
In August, Nazarene Compassionate Ministries (NCM) approved the proposal as an official NCM project. (Visit www.ncm.org.)
Powerless
The dam on the Kayne River was originally built in the early 1970s, shortly following the hospital’s completion in 1967. The dam was rebuilt in 1996.
In March, the river experienced a flood so great that members of the local community don’t remember a more devastating flood in their lifetimes, McCoy said, even though the area averages 200 inches of rain in a year.
The flood created a new Y in the Kayne River, diverting water from the canals that ordinarily would capture water to generate electricity. Photo courtesy Bill McCoy.
“The storm concentrated over the Kayne River catchment, upstream from us and from our dam and gates,” McCoy said. “We were no match. Huge boulders were rolling, banks caved in, the torrent swept over and around and through the dam and gates. We stood on the hillsides and watched in amazement as our once-friendly Kayne River had been transformed into a raging beast.”
Since then, the hospital has been forced to rely on the regional electricity infrastructure, which is unreliable.
“Full outages happen most days, though not every day,” McCoy said. “Most are brief – a few minutes. We use back-up diesel generators for prolonged outages.”
Even simple power fluctuations can be dangerous to hospital equipment and patients. Power surges can damage medical equipment, and fluctuations may alter patients’ test results produced by electrically-powered medical equipment, according to the hospital’s project proposal.
And it is not only the hospital that experiences outages. The dam also supplies power to the Church of the Nazarene’s Melanesia Field Office, the Nazarene College of Nursing, Kudjip Primary School, Community Based Health Care Office and staff and missionary homes.
To further complicate matters, the electrical system will need to support Kudjip Nazarene Hospital’s new, larger complex, which is in the final stages of completion. (To learn more about the new hospital, read the stories in www.ncnnews.com.)
Help is on the way
Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian community development and emergency relief organization, in May sent an experienced team of three engineers to help the hospital move and install some of its medical equipment into the new building. While on site they were asked to help assess the hydroelectric power system.
Bill Wright, a Samaritan’s Purse engineer who has worked on electrical systems in 30 countries, was startled at the system’s abysmal state.
Wright is working closely with the new hospital’s project manager missionary Michael Chapman and Canadian Hydro to improve the new dam’s design, secure parts, and ship the materials to Papua New Guinea for installation.
Missionary Michael Chapman, project manager of the
new hospital construction project, put in 90-hour weeks
to complete the hydroelectrical dam design and funding
proposal.
Canadian Hydro, a major hydroelectric supplier, built the original system that was destroyed. Although the company no longer builds the model of machine that was part of the plant, it still had one left in storage and offered to sell it to the hospital for a low price that would cover the company’s costs to rebuild it. Canadian Hydro is also working to replace other major components.
Besides a new and improved power system, Wright said the hospital also needs qualified and experienced engineers to maintain the hydroelectric plant, as well as the hospital’s internal electrical infrastructure.
“It’s fairly easy to get health care professionals” to work at a mission hospital, Wright said, “but people that actually work on the equipment, like biomedical or electrical” are more difficult to find.
Let there be light
It goes without saying that the mission hospital’s patients depend on consistent electricity for their health and lives, as well as affordable health care costs. For another mom delivering her first baby at the hospital on Aug. 20, one of the frequent power outages was ill-timed.
Nazarene missionary doctor Andy Bennett described the exhausting labor the mother was experiencing before the baby finally moved low enough that Bennett could deliver the baby using a vacuum device.
“That’s about when the power went off for a spell,” he wrote in his blog.
The power abruptly came on and he delivered the baby. As commonly happens, the procedure left a deep tear in the woman that he needed to sew up.
“We were mostly ready for that when the power went off for the longest period of the evening,” he wrote. “I just sat in the dark applying pressure to control the bleeding while we all waited for the power to come back on.”
Eventually it did and mother and baby recovered well.
“Would you pray with us that God would continue to provide funds for the hydroelectric rebuild?” asked Dr. Wallace on her blog. “Would you pray that power would be sustained during emergency cases? Would you pray for enablement of our electricians and workers to quickly be able to fix this important issue? I know God answers prayers, even quick ones like, ‘Help, I need a little light!’”