Workers and patients were prohibited from using running water due to hyperchlorination against bacteria | The order not to drink from the taps or use the showers was extended from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.
patients and workers Clinical Hospital of Valencia they had to get by on Friday in the compound without being able to open the taps, or use the showers not even taking drinks out of the coffee machines. the whole system drinking water supply was locked for 13 hours (from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.) as the chlorine level in the cold water system had been increased to end legionellaafter high concentrations of the bacteria had been found in the taps of at least twenty rooms in the Cardiology and Nephrology wards and investigations are under way a possible contagion of a patient.
The workers had been officially notified during the previous day that they would not be able to use the taps or the showers throughout the day and the same was done hanging informative postersfor example, from the coffee machines that were also out of service when taking water for drinks from the general network.
dry foam for toilet
If a water cut for so many hours is already a nuisance in a normal home, in a hospital it is a major disturbance. The staff couldn’t or wash your hands and, as hospital workers explained to Levante-EMV, in some rooms it was asked bottled water to be able to function.
“On Thursday night the supervisors were moving it so that from general services they would send us bottled water to clean the sick and that they had something to drink,” explains a worker at the center. The liter and a half bottles, however, did not reach some of the hospital wards from where this solution had been considered. In some, nursing assistants resorted to one dry foam for washing patients “It’s what they usually spend but without water,” they explain.
In the operating rooms, and according to internal sources, they had placed filters in faucets to avoid problems and that there would be a minimum of service in these critical areas.
“The faucets could be used for hand washing”
However, hospital sources insisted yesterday that the order was limited to consuming water from the network or use the showers due to the increase in chlorine in the system, but “the taps for washing hands and the toilets have worked normally,” they explained.
The hyperchlorination of the water system is one of the treatments provided for in the official protocols when Legionella is detected in a community water system such as, in this case, that of the Clinical Hospital. The other is the generate a “term shock” in the hot water system to kill any bacteria that might have proliferated there, a procedure that was also carried out during those thirteen hours in which neither the taps nor the showers could be used.
“Everything jumps out of the bush”
“The feeling is chaos“explained the workers who criticize how the crisis that has generated the detection of legionella has been resolved. “Everything to jump from the bush”, they lament. The center explained midway through the week that additional toilets had been set up but it seems that these were not they had reached all the pavilions and that they were placed punctually in the Cardiology and Nephrology rooms of pavilion B where on Wednesday it was prohibited to use the taps when the samples tested positive.
The hospital center took water samples to look for legionella as part of the research of a possible contagion inside the hospital. Official sources have not wanted to offer data regarding this possible case, but a resident of l’Horta Nord has denounced that his mother died this past Monday of legionella pneumonia at the Clinical Hospital and that the contagion must have occurred within the wards since the octogenarian had been hospitalized for two weeks.