According to Managing Director Prithvi Mohandas, the river breached at midnight on Tuesday, flooding the campus. “By then, we had moved out 30 ICU patients to the seventh floor of the safest place in the hospital. This block was built four times above the 100-year floodline. But by Wednesday morning, we lost power completely – the generator sets too, were damaged by the water. The ventilators did not work, nor did the monitors or any equipment. We had to do everything manually. We were totally cut off – phone lines did not work and the hospital was inaccessible. We tried to contact rescue services but no one came until Thursday,” he said.
However the State health department’s statement says that from December 1 (Tuesday) onwards, the hospital had begun discharging patients – 50 on that day and 250 on December 3. Of the remaining 275 patients, 56 were on ventilator support as of December 3, and were also being shifted to neighbouring private hospitals from December 3 onwards.
PVA Mohandas, chairman of the hospital said the ICU patients in the medical block, which is in a lower part of the compound and had been inundated even during the last bout of rains had been shifted to the first and second floors of the first building in the compound. “The patients who died were very ill. We did manually ventilate them with all our staff but we couldn’t adjust to the amount of ventilation they required. The deaths were only due to ventilator failure,” he said.
That day, distress calls from the hospital asked for oxygen and evacuation of patients due to flooding. Seven 108 ambulances had also been arranged to transfer 140 in-patients, the statement said. But an inspection revealed that with no standby generators, 14 bodies were in mortuary of the hospital that had no power. As these could cause a health hazard, on the written requisition of MIOT, the bodies were removed to Government Royapettah Hospital. These bodies, the statement said, were of patients who had died due to medical reasons in the last few days and had apparently not been taken away as the relatives had not been able to come, because of extensive flooding in the ciy.
As per procedure, post-mortem examinations are being conducted to formally ascertain the cause of death.
