Underground trains disrupted medical equipment

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Tests revealed that sensitive medical equipment in Melbourne’s major hospital precinct was disrupted by underground trains travelling along the city's 'still to be opened' metro tunnel

Transcript

00:00The State Government concedes that tests on the underground trains running underneath

00:08us here have disrupted very finely calibrated MRI machines here at the Peter MacCallum Cancer

00:15Centre, which is in Parkville, on the northern fringes of Melbourne's CBD.

00:22And that's because these trains emit an electric or electromagnetic field, and that electromagnetic

00:28interference has interrupted these very finely calibrated machines, and so they haven't passed

00:36those performance tests.

00:38Now this is a potential problem that has been flagged for many years during the planning

00:42phase of the Melbourne Tunnel Project, and project organisers have been working with

00:48medical and research institutions here at Parkville for more than five years to try

00:52to mitigate these risks.

00:54The State Government insists that you couldn't actually work out the exact impact until the

01:00construction phase had largely finished, and they were able to get the trains on the tracks

01:05to properly test just the level of the impact.

01:08And it also says that the jury is still not out, because only 20 kilometres worth of testing

01:13has been done, and still there is another 150,000 kilometres worth of testing to be

01:20completed.

01:21Cancer care hasn't been put at risk during this process, because patients have been using

01:25MRI machines that have been at a specially designed area of the Royal Melbourne Hospital

01:31nearby, and that's been created to mitigate these risks, and in fact the State Government

01:36says that the test results have shown positive results on that so far.

01:42And also they've been using some of the machines that had to be relocated to the Peter Mac's

01:47East Melbourne facility.

01:50This Peter Mac Cancer Centre opened amid much fanfare in 2016 at the cost of $1 billion,

01:58and the State Government says that if they continue to have to relocate these very large

02:04machines out of the hospital, or mitigate these risks with extra construction here,

02:10then that is obviously going to be the taxpayers who have to foot this very large bill.

02:20For more information visit www.royalmelbourne.gov.uk

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