Assess Your Vulnerability
Outdated Hospital Generators in Your Jurisdiction Could be a Ticking Time Bomb.
There’s no easy shortcut for jurisdictions seeking to determine whether its hospital generator fleet includes seriously outdated generators.
Government agencies do not track this information and work to date by jurisdictions to capture data on hospital generators has generally only focused on the number and size of generators at hospitals, not their age. Any jurisdiction that wishes to determine how many outdated generators exist is encouraged to work with their state or local hospital association when seeking this information from hospitals.
Jurisdictions pursuing this information will need to understand what is considered an outdated generator. A white paper on this topic was jointly published in 2017 by Eric Cote and Jonathan Flannery of the American Society of Healthcare Engineering (ASHE). The white paper suggests 30 years is the useful life of a diesel generator.
The census of emergency power systems Cote conducted for the LA County EMS Agency in 2021 captured data on 271 generators at 80 hospitals. As the first table illustrates, just over 30% of the fleet consisted of generators 30 years or older, with 15 generators between 50 and 60 years of age. Even more alarming, the percentage of outdated generators in the 14 single generator hospitals was twice as high, at 64 percent (see second table).
EMS Agency officials were understandably alarmed by these findings and enlisted Cote’s help to develop a plan to mitigate the risks posed by outdated generators, especially those in single generator hospitals.
To address the elevated risk of an emergency evacuation should a single generator facility experience a generator failure, the LAC EMS Agency offered funding to these facilities to deploy Power P.I.O.N.E.E.R., an advanced generator monitoring technology that provided 24/7, automated, real-time notifications to designated individuals anytime emergency power was activated or faced a mechanical problem while operating. The system’s real-time warning would enable accelerated response by service providers and faster deployment of a government generator if one was needed, both of which can help minimize the risk of an emergency evacuation. As of September 2021, two of the fourteen eligible facilities had deployed Power P.I.O.N.E.E.R. (P.I.O.N.E.E.R. stands for Power Information Needed to Expedite Emergency Response.)
Cote also recommended that the EMS Agency develop a confidential two-tier Emergency Power System Risk Calculation for individual hospitals. The goal of the risk rating was to help EMS Agency officials maintain closer vigilance of hospitals with emergency power systems considered at higher risk for failure or with systems whose failures were more likely to trigger an emergency evacuation (single generator hospitals). Cote also recommended a new protocol to accelerate emergency power status reporting during power outages. Both recommendations were adopted by the EMS Agency and are detailed in the LA County’s Healthcare Facility Emergency Power Resilience Playbook.
The approach taken by the LA County EMS Agency in capturing data on hospital emergency power systems offers a valuable guide. EMS Agency officials explained to hospitals that they needed to know the number and size of generators at each hospital in case they needed to deploy any of the EMS Agency’s standby temporary generators during a power outage. The EMS Agency also assured hospitals that data on the number and age of generators in their emergency power systems would never be made public. This pledge was intended to prevent the public from drawing the wrong conclusion about the safety of emergency power in hospitals with only one generator, or in facilities with outdated generators. No current federal or state rules limit the age of a generator as long as the generator can perform all required tests. The outdated generators discovered during the LA County census had passed these tests.
The EMS Agency’s pledge to maintain the confidentiality of generator data was put to the test in 2022 when a reporter for the Los Angeles Times sought information from the EMS Agency about single-generator hospitals in Los Angeles County. Since the initiative was funded with Hospital Preparedness Program (HPP) dollars from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), HHS officials advised EMS Agency leaders that they were not obligated to provide the information requested by the newspaper.
Jurisdictions seeking assistance in capturing data on the age of hospital generators can contact Eric Cote, the EMS Agency’s project consultant, at cote@poweredforpatients.org.