Gera (dpa/th) - Firefighters sealed a leak in a Gera hospital from which toxic ammonia escaped. A technician and a firefighter were slightly injured, a fire department spokesman said on Monday. Gas was no longer escaping, but some rooms in the hospital still had to be specially ventilated so that the ammonia concentration in the air dropped to a safe level, it was said at noon.
Postponable operations were canceled for the day, said the spokeswoman for the SRH Wald-Klinikum, Katrin Wiesner. Patients from the rescue center and the adjacent outpatient clinic had been transferred. In addition, the house will remain closed to visitors on Monday. The police had blocked the access roads to the hospital over a wide area. The clinic spokeswoman assumed that normal operations would be possible again from Tuesday.
The leak arose during a planned repair of an emergency cooling system, said Wiesner. Exactly how this came about has yet to be clarified.
