Water-main break floods Seven Oaks hospital; dialysis nurses — including MLA — scramble to save lives

Dialysis nurses answered the call to provide “life sustaining” care on Sunday after a water-main break flooded Seven Oaks General Hospital on the weekend.

“It was really amazing to see everyone come together because we know dialysis is a life-sustaining treatment,” said Tuxedo MLA Carla Compton, a licensed nurse who answered the call.

A water-main break caused flooding that was noticed Saturday night on the lower level of the hospital, a major provider of kidney health services in Manitoba.

“When people miss a treatment, it can mean their lives,” Compton said Monday after question period at the legislature. She worked as a dialysis nurse for 14 years before winning a 2024 byelection in Tuxedo, the seat previously held by former premier Heather Stefanson.

Compton and Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara — who was grilled inside the chamber with questions about safety in hospitals and the reliability of infrastructure — spoke to reporters about the water-main break.

Asagwara said the break resulted from deterioration of the water main and was repaired late Sunday.

“We are in the process of evaluating infrastructure. We understand as a government, when something of this seriousness occurs, we need to assess, we need to review and see where we can make investments to try to prevent this from happening,” Asagwara said.

“In some places, the water had gotten up as high as four feet (1.2 metres) off the ground. It was really, really substantial. Thankfully, there’s a clear protocol in place. Everybody came together very quickly to make sure that we were not only looking at restoring the patient services at the site — protecting the services at urgent care — and also making sure that if we needed to dialyze patients outside of Seven Oaks, which we did, we were able to do that.”

Compton, for instance, went to Health Sciences Centre, where she’d never worked before, to help with dialysis.

“There were nurses from Seven Oaks, there were nurses from St. Boniface, there were nurses from HSC all coming together,” she said. “This was about all the other nurses I really do want to lift up.”

She figures she helped between 10 and 15 patients, none of whom recognized her as the NDP — MLA for Tuxedo.

Asagwara thanked health leaders and Maple Leaf Construction, which worked around the clock to fully restore services.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca