Firefighters put out electrical fire at Peconic Bay MRI unit

Riverhead firefighters extinguished an electrical fire at the MRI unit at Peconic Bay Medical Center early Sunday morning.

An exterior electrical connection for the MRI unit appears to have shorted out, PBMC president and CEP Andrew Mitchell said. The fire did not damage or affect the MRI unit itself, he said. The MRI is housed in a portable building on the southeast side of the hospital, near the entrance to the skilled nursing facility.

About 60 volunteer firefighters on five trucks responded to the call, which came in just before 6:30 a.m., Riverhead Second Assistant Chief Kevin Brooks said. Firefighters extinguished the burning wires with a dry chemical extinguisher, he said.

Mitchell said the hospital’s electricians would immediately get to work troubleshooting the issue and repairing the problem.

MRI, which stands for magnetic resonance imaging, is “a test that uses a magnetic field and pulses of radio wave energy to make pictures of organs and structures inside the body,” according to WebMD. It is a useful diagnostic tool because “in many cases MRI gives different information about structures in the body than can be seen with an X-ray, ultrasound, or computed tomography (CT) scan.”

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