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SALT LAKE CITY — An estimated 4,000 gallons of water flooded the top floors of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center Sunday.
A major hot water pipe broke just after midnight, flooding the fourth and fifth floors, said Dr. Angela Williams, executive director at the VA Salt Lake City Health Care system. The engineering team for the building estimates 30 gallons of water leaked, per minute, from the pipe.
The timing of the flood was also poor, with over 900 veterans ages 55 and over converging on Salt Lake City for the Golden Age Games this week. Specialty care areas like ophthalmology and urology were the most impacted, Williams told KSL NewsRadio.
"We have a lot of expensive equipment up there," she said. "We have a lot of electronics that are damaged, a lot of high dollar equipment that we still haven't been able to assess."
Staff are waiting to dry out the equipment, which will be evaluated by biomedical engineers before determining the total damages.
The flooding impacted 309 veterans with appointments on Monday and another 297 on Tuesday, according to Williams. Many of those have been rescheduled or shifted to telehealth appointments.
Administrators are working to fill unused clinics in facilities across the valley, including some in South Jordan and the mental health building in Salt Lake City. Williams says portable clinics are also an option to fill gaps in care.
"We're looking at what's being moved where, how long it's going to take, and what we need," she said. They expect a "more definitive direction" on the plan to accommodate veterans by the end of the week, as well as cost estimates.
Williams currently estimates the timeline until the hospital returns to normal operations is two to three months, but hopes they can retain their patients.
"We provide better care within the VA system than we feel the community does, and we have studies to show that, so we want to keep our veterans in-house," she said, and switching between providers adds complexity to patient care.
The facility has access to emergency funds on a regional and national level, Williams says, but unless there are big changes, the building, built in 1950, will continue to see problems.
"Unfortunately we're in an old building and so we're used to dealing with floods, but just not to this magnitude," Williams said. "This is not the first time we've dealt with it and it's probably not the last until we get a new hospital."
Correction: Officials initially reported the broken pipe leaked 4,000 gallons of water per minute, for a total of 33,000 gallons. They have since revised this estimate to 30 gallons per minute, for a total of 4,000 gallons.
