A water main break has hobbled a New Jersey hospital after days of subfreezing temperatures across the region.
Cooper Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston was forced to postpone non-emergency surgeries and divert ambulances after a pipe burst outside the hospital on Thursday. While the main was repaired by Thursday evening, the event could continue to curtail services for days as additional safety measures are taken, hospital officials said Friday morning.
The facility remains open to walk-in emergencies but is sending most ambulances to other facilities and some outpatient programs continue to be postponed, said spokeswoman Carrie Cristello. Burn patients arriving by ambulance will continue to be treated at the hospital, she said. It is unclear if the broken water main caused flooding in the hospital but Cristello said the facility’s drinking water may have been impacted. No patients had been transferred as a result of the break on Thursday.
The rupture occurred outside the emergency department of the 579-bed hospital, part of the RWJBarnabas Health network, on Thursday morning after more than two weeks of overnight temperatures dropping into the twenties and teens, causing water to expand in pipes and weakening infrastructure across the state. The incident follows at least two other water main breaks in northern New Jersey this week.
By 7 p.m. Thursday, the main had been repaired but testing to ensure the hospital’s water is safe to drink is ongoing, the hospital said in a statement Friday. That testing began Friday morning and could take between 24 and 48 hours to complete.
The event puts a small dent in one the biggest revenue drivers for RWJBarnabas Health, the state’s largest academic health system. The Livingston hospital brought in $1.2 billion in revenue in 2023, about a seventh of the health system’s $8.6 billion in total revenue that year, according to its latest annual financial statement. Its emergency department sees approximately 95,000 patients each year, its website states.
