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
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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