UPS battery fire reported at PGIMER hospital data centre in Chandigarh
Oct 2023Published 12 Oct 2026Responsible editor: Chief Editor
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What happened
At 11:55 pm on 9 October 2023 a fire broke out in C Block of Nehru Hospital at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER) in Chandigarh, northern India. The fire started in the battery bank of the centralised UPS serving the institute's data centre, which contained 160 batteries. The fire has been blamed on a short circuit in the UPS batteries. It spread quickly to an adjoining staircase, and more than 400 patients were evacuated.
A report on the fire said the fire department had advised PGIMER in 2016 and 2019 to move the battery bank outside the hospital building for proper ventilation and maintenance, and that this advice had not been followed. One week later a second fire at the Advanced Eye Centre was also attributed to a short circuit in UPS batteries. Damage was put at Rs 12.26 crore, about 1.5 million US dollars.
Contributing factors
The battery bank was housed inside the hospital building. The fire department's advice to relocate the battery bank in 2016 and 2019, for proper ventilation and maintenance, was not followed. According to the source, UPS maintenance by C-DAC ran until 2015, and the battery bank was replaced in 2016 and 2019. The fire department advised in January 2022 that an expression of interest be issued for efficient operation and maintenance of the UPS system. Reports say PGIMER had no fire safety certificate from 2021.
Lessons learned
- Locate UPS battery banks in dedicated, ventilated rooms away from occupied buildings and escape routes, and act on fire authority advice within a set timeframe.
- Keep a current fire safety certificate and review it whenever power equipment is changed or relocated.
- Maintain a continuous service contract for UPS battery systems, and check regularly for signs of deterioration and short-circuit risk, since a gap in maintenance is an early warning sign.
More lessons on outages, backup supply and restoration, design, standards and commissioning, detection and monitoring, from every incident on the register.
Source
Published 2026-10-12. Written from public reporting. Descriptive, not investigative. See the data accuracy disclaimer.
