Officials say power was interrupted in the South Tower of Northeast Georgia Medical Center's Gainesville campus for nearly two hours Saturday afternoon.
Holly Crawford with corporate communications for Georgia Power says power went out at the hospital at around 2:10 p.m. and was brought back on just before 4:00.
Melissa Tymchuk with the Northeast Georgia Health System said the outage was likely caused by thunderstorms that moved through the area that caused a rare hiccup in the hospital's power failsafe. She said Georgia Power responded quickly to the outage and hospital officials worked to maintain patient care throughout the outage.
"We have systems in place and practices that we follow anytime something like this might happen," Tymchuk said. "We put those procedures in to place, which included, in some cases, changing operations...but then for critical patients...those were moved to the North Tower which, thankfully, was unaffected."
Gainesville Fire Division Chief Kieth Smith said fire officials sent crews to provide emergency lighting until power was restored. He also said fire officials stayed on scene to ensure the generators were working properly before leaving.
