Losing power halfway through a serious procedure could have resulted in tragedy at a dental clinic had the owners not forked out for their own generator.

Alex and Rhys Naylor of Goldfields Family Dental say they were halfway through a complex and expensive implant procedure when the power went out on Friday last week.

With the procedure requiring all the patient’s teeth to be removed while under sedation, Mrs Naylor said it was the “absolute worst time” for there to be an outage.

But the pair had already lost faith in the stability of local power and — knowing the risks an outage could pose to patients — they had bought a generator about two years ago.

“Each of these cases are worth about $60,000, and we had two scheduled that day, so we flew specialists in from Perth,” Mrs Naylor said.

“We’re lucky enough to have them say ‘yes’ to come to our clinic, and then this happens.

“We were halfway and if we had to stop the procedure there … the patient would have woken up and he would have had to be sutured while he was awake, which wouldn’t have been good for anyone.

“The patient certainly would have been upset, and so would the anaesthetist and I can guarantee he would not have come back.

“Thank God we had a generator, or else who knows what could have happened.”

Mr Naylor said the frequency of power outages prompted the couple to fork out for a generator two-and-a-half years ago so the business could stay open and potential safety issues could be avoided.

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