It’s the time of year when we start to see public safety power shutoffs in the Tri-Counties as a precaution against power lines accidentally triggering brush fires. It can be inconvenient for us. But, it can be disastrous for community health clinic.
“It’s critical to us. We’re one of the only providers of children’s vaccines in Ventura County. They’re highly regulated by the State of California, and we have to keep them in a refrigerator and freezer,” said Fred Bauermeister, who is is Executive Director of the Free Clinic of Simi Valley.
“They have to have a battery backup (for outages). In our case, the battery backup only last for a few hours, so when there’s a power outage for a major period of time, we’re scrambling to find a generator,” said the clinic official.
He said a Santa Barbara County based relief agency stepped up to help.
“Direct Relief game us a grant so that we could put 135 solar panels on our roof, so as I am speaking to you, the clinic is powered by solar,” said Bauermeister.
Direct Relief is know for helping people hit by disasters, and conflict around the world with medicine, and medical supplies. But, after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, the relief agency received some unexpected types of request for aid.
“It (help with power) was the number one priority from the health facilities,” said Thomas Tighe, who is the President, and CEO of Direct Relief. He said clinics told Direct Relief they couldn’t function without help finding power sources. “That’s how we got into this space in the first place…no one else was doing it.”
Tighe said they made their new headquarters and warehouse facility in Santa Barbara self-sufficient, so it could keep operating in a disaster. He said they saw the need to help provide resilient power supplies to community health clinics.
Direct Relief created a program to help, called Power For Health.
Tighe said there are dozens of the projects in the works. It’s not just adding solar power to the clinics, it’s adding storage batteries to make them self-sufficient. And, in some cases generators are also part of the mix.
“The resilience is in the stored power if the grid goes down,” said Tighe.
In the case of the Free Clinic of Simi Valley, the solar system provided by Direct Relief is setting the stage for the non-profit to be energy independent.
Bauermeister said they already a a storage battery system which will be installed this summer. That combined with the solar system will give the clinic the ability to keep operating, even if a major fire or earthquake cuts it off from the commercial power grid.
Many of the clinics being helped have similar stories to the one in Simi Valley. Without the Direct Relief program, they wouldn’t be able to make the critical improvements need to make them power resilient. Officials with the non-profits can’t afford to take funds away from their efforts to help their patients.
This post was originally published on 3rd party site mentioned in the title of this site
