© 2024 KZYX
redwood forest background
Mendocino County Public Broadcasting
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Local News

Hospital freezer fails as new supes sworn in

January 5, 2021 — Two new county supervisors were sworn in yesterday morning, shortly before the compressor went out in a freezer containing 830 doses of the Moderna vaccine at the Ukiah Valley Adventist Hospital.

Adventist Health and the county’s public health department get separate allocations of vaccines from the state. So far, the county has received one batch of 975 doses from Pfizer and one batch of 400 from Moderna.

Most of the county’s allocation of 400 doses was in the malfunctioning freezer, minus sixty that were used at a clinic at the fairgrounds in the afternoon. CEO Carmel Angelo said that the scheduled clinic did proceed as planned. As for the unexpectedly defrosted medicine, Public Health Officer Dr. Andrew Coren said “every one of those vaccines found a person’s arm,” after the city of Ukiah, three nursing homes and a church were among the entities that put together emergency clinics to administer all the vaccines before they were presumed to expire at 2pm. A hospital spokeswoman confirmed that after the freezer’s compressor failed, an alarm that would have alerted staff also failed. She said a manual log indicated the exact time of the power failure, which is how administrators knew, at around 11:30 in the morning, that they only had a few hours to find the arms they needed.

Tami Bartolomei, the emergency management coordinator for the city of Ukiah, reported that her team took about fifteen minutes to put together a clinic at the conference center. City EMTs gave the vaccine to over a hundred people, including seven floor staff from Building Bridges, the homeless shelter.

Sheriff Matt Kendall said NaphCare nurses from the jail inoculated 94 sheriff’ s department and other county personnel, including himself, in the Donovan Room, near the Emergency Operations Center. An eyewitness to the scene at the hospital, where vaccines were also being given out, described people running from all directions and lines snaking into the hospital and a nearby doctor’s office.

The tier structure was not strictly observed during the rush to dispose of the vaccine.

Changed plans were the order of the day.

Before everyone in Ukiah who was qualified to give a vaccine suddenly found themselves doing just that, another long-anticipated event took place in the hallway at the county administrative building. A full rainbow arched across the sky over Low Gap, but intermittent rain scotched the plans for an outdoor ceremony.

Inside, air filters blared and masked family members stood at a distance as First District Supervisor Glenn McGourty and Second District Supervisor Maureen Mulheren were sworn in  to their new offices. 

The agenda for the new supervisors’ first meeting is packed, with first of the year administrative matters as well as attempts to address homelessness, cannabis, and law enforcement. Supervisors will discuss the installation of kitchenettes at the former Best Wester Inn in Ukiah, to turn hotel rooms into living units for homeless people. The cannabis ad hoc committee will bring forward a proposal it hopes will nudge more phase 1 growers toward a state license. And the sheriff will present a plan to try to get the state to pay for more deputies to fight organized crime and illegal grows. There’s also an item on the consent calendar recommending a retroactive agreement with former Public Health Officer Dr. Noemi Doohan for $100,000 effective for the entire year of 2021.

Local News