Hospital director Kamil Barczyk and Bolesławiec County head Tomasz Gabrysiak thanked the emergency services during Wednesday’s briefing. They stressed that no one was injured.
Photographs indicate that an excavator damaged the gas pipeline. Work on the hospital expansion has been halted. A prosecutor is on site.
Kamil Barczyk, hospital director:
The hospital is currently operating normally again. We are admitting patients on an outpatient and inpatient basis, and we are also accepting emergency patients. All services were notified that the hospital resumed normal operations at 2:00 p.m. I would like to express my sincere thanks to all the technical and emergency services, as well as to the hospital staff, for their contribution to the evacuation, for their effort and for the operation itself, which I believe proceeded very well and efficiently. Further activities will now be carried out to clarify the situation and establish what really happened.
Tomasz Gabrysiak, Bolesławiec County head:
All services arrived immediately, and all necessary safety measures were carried out to prevent any negative consequences related to the gas pipeline failure. I would like to sincerely thank the commanders present here because, as I have already stressed, their personal involvement ensured that the operation was conducted quickly and efficiently. The site of the failure has been secured, and the hospital is returning to normal operations. At approximately 2:30 p.m.—that is, at this moment—all departments are beginning to work and operate, and I hope that such a situation will not happen again.
I think this is also a valuable lesson for us on how to act in such difficult situations involving completely unforeseen failures.
The Bolesławiec district commander of the State Fire Service, Andrzej Śliwowski, also spoke:
After receiving a report of a gas leak near the hospital building, we dispatched rescue units to the site. Their primary objective was to secure the scene and then identify the areas that needed to be evacuated. In cooperation with hospital staff, we determined that only one wing needed to be evacuated, including staff and patients.
Then, in cooperation with the gas emergency service, measures were taken to secure the gas leak from the damaged section of the pipeline. After it was sealed, a specialist chemical rescue group was also brought to the site to check the entire building for potentially dangerous gas concentrations. It was confirmed that the entire wing was safe and that there were no explosive gas concentrations posing a threat to the life or health of the people using the facility, so all evacuees were allowed to return.
(...) The resources at our disposal were sufficient for this type of incident, so it can be said that we had the situation under control and carried out the operation in accordance with our procedures. I would also like to stress that throughout the operation, the firefighters monitoring gas concentrations—both outside and inside the building, did not confirm the presence of concentrations that would be explosive.