Re: Side by side
A decade or so ago I was visiting Basingstoke and North Hampshire hospital while work was going on in the car park and indeed in many places around the main hospital building. It was in the winter, and late afternoon, so not very bright outside. It's a quite busy regional hospital.
There was a bit of a bang from somewhere, and the lights went off, as did everything else that was mains powered. People in the know waited. And waited. The backup didn't come on. No mains power anywhere in the main building.
Gradually, people in the know started being shit scared. Understandably. I wasn't just scared (despite being just a visitor passing through) but I was effing angry too. Not only had some inadequately-supervised cowboy in a backhoe been allowed to dig through the main incoming supply, the generator backup's cable was (as hinted a few posts ago) in the same trench and consequently also taken out.
You'd maybe think it couldn't get any worse, but work was going on in the main hospital corridor and there was a full height "temporary" (as in, "many weeks") partition along most of the corridor's length. The emergency lighting (with local battery power) along the corridor was lit but useless because some idiot had allowed the temporary partition to be built in front of the emergency lighting and done nothing about providing temporary emergency lighting while the real thing was obscured.
So there are people rushing about the hospital trying to respond to a "should never happen" condition, and the main corridor is (by now) in *total* darkness apart from a few people with hand-held battery lighting.
Absolutely appalling. Amazingly, I don't remember it being in the local or national press at the time.
In slight contrast, a few miles north of there, and rather more recently, Royal Berks (Reading) hospital partially lost their electricity and declared a major incident, closing A+E. Well you would wouldn't you, especially if you hadn't properly tried your DR plan recently:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/nhs/11776054/Royal-Berkshire-Hospital-AandE-shut-after-power-cut.html (31 Jul 2015)