They also almost always spiked during the switchover

Thats normal, when you bring on a generator you actauly spin them faster than synch speed so that they take on load when the breaker closes, if they are spinning slower they'd become a load. When you close the generator breaker and the new generator is brought online at a different 'speed' there will be a brief 'short' as the bus's are operating at different 'volategs' and frequencies <handwaving a lot here> until the side with the msot inertia (normally the grid or the current site supply) 'wins' and causes the lesser to match speed. If you get this wrong you get a pole-slip fault and fuck the generator entirely.

They had 4 generator's all controlled together

I'd be suprised how they'd even do that, like common start/stop and mcaro controls etc are fine but typicaly generator portection relays and AVR are entirely seperate/discrete for each generator.

Instead if one failed, we were in the dark

They shoudl have a spare in the set, but on a small site its not uncommon for that to be an interlock, if the generators cannot sustain operation/remain stable with 1 lost then you may aswell trip all of them off and wait to blackstart - otherwise you're going to be tripping them off on overload anyway.