My Transplant Hospital without Water!

Main break to leave Piedmont Hospital, Buckhead with no water
Will be dry about 12 hours as crews work to fix problem; some surgeries canceled

By MIKE MORRIS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 03/12/08

Piedmont Hospital and a section of Buckhead will be without water Wednesday night starting at 6 p.m., as crews work to repair a water main break that resulted in low pressure in the area all day Wednesday, the city of Atlanta said.

"The work will necessitate an interruption of water service overnight. Customers may want to fill their bathtubs in order to have water to flush toilets and have bottled water on hand for drinking and personal hygiene," the city's water management agency said in a media advisory.

The city said the water outage will affect addresses between 1690 and 2300 Peachtree Road, from 6 p.m. Wednesday until 6 a.m. Thursday.

The pressure problem forced Piedmont to cancel some surgeries and to divert emergency patients to other hospitals.

The problems began late Tuesday afternoon when a water main broke near the hospital, which is on Peachtree Road just north of Collier Road in Buckhead.

"We have been experiencing low and dropping water pressure all night," hospital spokeswoman Diana Lewis said Wednesday morning. "A hospital needs full pressure."

Lewis said the broken main was repaired, but a faulty valve kept water pressure low. City water crews worked to bypass the valve, but pressure remained low, she said.

"The emergency department is on complete diversion, and that will remain until we're comfortable with being able to take in new patients," Lewis said. "If someone shows up, we have to take care of them the best we can, but we're trying to divert those patients to other hospitals."

Lewis said the hospital was working with physicians to postpone surgeries and other procedures when possible. "Of course, it's their call; it's their patients," she said.

A liver transplant scheduled for Tuesday morning was postponed because of concerns that if the water pressure dropped during the lengthy procedure, the building's cooling system might fail "and the sterile environment would be compromised," Lewis said.

Dialysis patients, who are housed on the sixth floor of the hospital, were taken to an outpatient dialysis clinic in another building on the Piedmont campus for treatment because of problems getting adequate water pressure on the upper floors of the hospital.

She said the hospital had shut down the bathrooms in the medical office buildings.

"We do have four bathrooms on each floor for patients, and all the public bathrooms in the hospital are open, but we have gone to water interruption measures, which means bottled water is everywhere," she said. The hospital has "at least a thousand gallons of water on hand immediately," she said.

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