Intensive Care Unit ceiling leak patched

Staff at Petersburg Medical Center sprung into action earlier this month when a sudden leak erupted from part of the building's hydronic heating system, spewing dozens of gallons of mixed water in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) room behind the nurse's station on the hospital's second floor.

Maintenance staff were able to patch the leak with plumbing parts, but have not been able to find a replacement for the actual piece that was leaking yet.

There was not a patient in that particular room at the time, but the leak sprung above the where the bed was located.

When nurses realized water was "raining from the ceiling," they moved to clear everything out of the room, arranged trash cans to catch the water and called out for assistance.

PMC Operations Manager Wolf Brooks, who does maintenance for the aging facility, described the scene as "chaos."

Water was pouring from the ceiling tiles, maybe 50 gallons or so.

"It was a lot of gallons. It was not a drip-drip situation," PMC CEO Phil Hofstetter said at a hospital board meeting after the incident.

"People were in the rafters and the ceiling, and there was water everywhere, just gushing out of the ICU," described board member Heather Conn. "The bed got wet. Phil was moving beds down the corridor and I was thinking, what is going on around here?"

Brooks explained that an air bleeder -part of the hydronic heating system- failed, spraying the room with the water-glycol mix used inside the hospital's heating line and other residues that had broken free, which Brooks described as "pretty nasty."

While working to address the problem, what started as a "misty spray" began to pour.

Exposed electrical in the area heightened the risk as the maintenance team worked to contain the leak.

The only access point Brooks could fix the failure from was directly underneath the leak. "So I had to ... just get soaked to try to replace it."

Brooks' brother, who was visiting from Sitka, found the shut off valve "quite a ways away" down the hallway. "He had to literally pop his head up into the false ceiling" and follow the line with his eyes "until he found a valve that hopefully worked."

Water was shut off for the entire wing of the building for repairs.

Maintenance staff are still looking for a replacement for the air bleeder that failed and many other ones nearby that Brooks said "are very corroded and about to break as well ... it was rather staggering to see that."

The failure that caused the leak was due to the aging medical facility. "It just failed. I mean, it's at the point, it's 45 years old," said Brooks.

The leak is fixed, and Brooks reports no further damage to the facility because of the work done to mitigate moisture in that room, leaving ceiling tiles removed and setting up a number of HEPA filters and dehumidifiers.

"Now it's just a matter of trying to replace other [air bleeders] and identify them. Realistically, we can't do that fully ... there's hundreds ... [and] it's not just the air bleeders," said Brooks, adding that any place with threads like where brass pipes connect, "are going to fail soon."

He told the Pilot that the building's septic lines are "still the biggest concern because ... a lot of them are pretty close to breaking out..."

While the ICU leak has been remedied, similar incidents are likely to occur as the building's infrastructure continues to deteriorate.

"Basically every pressurized line in the hospital is at risk," hospital board member Marlene Cushing shared during the meeting last week. "They've reached the end of their expected lifespan, and this kind of thing can happen at any time ... and the whole system cannot be replaced because that would mean that we would have to go and change everything to meet current codes. So these things are going to keep happening."

At the board meeting, Phil Hofstetter emphasized advocating for the new hospital facility project to remain listed as a top capital priority, which will be considered at the Dec. 2 Petersburg Borough Assembly meeting. "It's really important to bring that forward so that we can have [potential state, federal funding] come through to the hospital, if possible," Hofstetter said.

With a new hospital facility in the works but years away from completion, PMC staff is tasked with keeping the current building operational despite increasing challenges. "I'd say it won't happen again but it probably will, sadly," Wolf concluded.