Shortly before 4am today, a power disruption was caused by a fire alarm at the TMD data centre in Bathurst Street.
The fire alarm was triggered by a fault in an air conditioning unit. Tasmania Fire Service attended the scene.
The data centre houses the IT networking and servers for a number of Government agencies, including:
Normal services have been restored for all agencies.
DPFEM:
DPFEM advised that at no stage was public safety compromised following the outage, and there was no interruption to service delivery.
Standard operating procedures were implemented for an event such as this and all communications were maintained, including 000 calls.
DHHS and Tasmanian Health Service:
DHHS and THS advised that despite the loss of a number of systems, patient safety was not impacted.
The temporary loss of systems prompted the initiation of a Code Yellow protocols at the Royal Hobart Hospital. This has now been removed as systems have been restored.
The Launceston General
Hospital, the North West Regional Hospital and the Mersey Community Hospital
experienced limited impact from the disruption, and did not need to enact a
protocol.
Ambulance Tasmania switched to manual dispatching during the shutdown, with no
emergency calls impacted.
State Growth
The Department of State Growth has advised that the outage disrupted communications between the central traffic signals control system (SCATS) and traffic lights in and around Hobart. As a result the Department was unable to monitor and adjust traffic signal timing in response to traffic volumes in the morning peak because the traffic lights were operating independently on default settings. This mode of operation is completely safe and there was no risk to road users.
Communications were restored at approximately 10:40am and traffic control systems are back to normal operation.
The incident will be reviewed by TMD.
The Government acknowledges the prompt and professional responses by staff from each agency involved who supported the continual provision of services to the public.
More Media Releases from Michael Ferguson
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