Frankie Poon, the people’s health and well-being minister during the Warisan-led administration, said administrators should know that uninterrupted water and electricity supply must be available to ensure a fully functional hospital.

“That is why I’m really furious about the blackout at QEH1,” the Sabah DAP chief told FMT.

“This should not have happened at all in a hospital, and the government needs to ensure this does not happen again.”

Sabah health director Dr Rose Nani Mudin told FMT today they believed a damaged electrical cable could have caused the outage, but said they were still investigating.

She also said 28 non-emergency operations were postponed today because of the outage.

Yesterday, Rose said QEH1 was forced to transfer patients to QEH2 following the blackout in the morning.

She said the 11.54am power cut affected the hospital’s twin towers, the specialist clinics and the old medical wing.

Throughout the blackout, two sets of backup generators were used to supply power to the affected parts of the hospital, she added in a statement.

Patients who had to undergo an operation were also transferred to QEH2.

Meanwhile, Kota Kinabalu MP Chan Foong Hin said Sabah Electricity Sdn Bhd had supplied three backup generators to supplement the hospital’s generators.

Chan said power outages were sadly becoming a common occurrence in Sabah.

“Not only in general hospitals, we have heard of the Kota Kinabalu international airport experiencing outages, too, while the industrial park and businesses in Sabah face a shortage of water supply.

“I would like to call upon the state government to put more money into ensuring that public strategic assets no longer suffer from such outages,” he said.

Chan said Sabah could forget about retaining human capital or attracting investors to Kota Kinabalu or the state if such problems continued to occur.