A legendary storm

They say that Arizona has spectacular lightning storms in the evenings during the monsoon season. Well, Thursday night we had a storm that exceeded all my expectations. At first, we could see lightning from far distances from our kitchen window. Then, the TV program we were watching would frequently be muted and an emergency broadcast message would blurt out a severe storm warning for the area. When it started raining I asked Jerolyn to come out and watch the storm in the covered back patio. Outside we could hear the continuous roar of thunder, because all around us lightning was forking across the dark sky non-stop. As usual during storms like this the water was running off the roof in sheets. The Thunder's roar and the flash of the lightning was steady for more than an hour.
I hoped the next morning the rain puddles would have cleared enough that I could ride my bicycle to work. It had, so I rode my bike to the bus stop. On the bus I read this email that came in on my Blackberry phone. I thought maybe I shouldn't be going into work since there may not have power at the hospital.
All,
Thursday night the central Phoenix area experienced a “hurricane like” storm that dumped rain at the rate of 5 inches per hour, pelted the area with hail and kicked up winds of up to 75 miles an hour. All of this together caused a number of issues at PCH.

Around 10p we experienced our first of three power outages followed by leaks on all floors and flooding in all the PICUs (we even had a frog that tried to take refuge in one of the PICU rooms). A transformer next to the hospital was struck by lightning and APS is currently working on it…but they are expecting power will not be restored to parts of Building A, and all of Building B, Building C, Rosenberg and Ronald McDonald House until about 10a. The generator that powers IT’s UPS failed (they are looking into the exact cause) and after the UPS power was drained we lost power to the data center. Due to the way things went up and down, we had to take down all systems and bring them back up. During this time (approximately 3 hours), there was intermittent access to these systems.

Everyone from all over the hospital responded quickly and resolved most of the issues by 2a, with some residual clean up that continued until 4a. We appreciate all of you who were involved in getting things back up for our customers throughout the hospital.

-Rae Ann Harris
Manager, Project Management Office

During my 3 mile ride from the bus stop in Phoenix to the hospital I rode past palm tree debris scattered in the street and many trees blown over. Some palm tree trunks had snapped and the roots of fallen mesquite trees had lifted up the concrete sidewalk. When I arrived I was surprised to see so many already in the office. The network team and Server (computer hardware) team were all there. Even the Chief Information operator (CIO) was there.