Consulting-Specifying Engineer - June 2008 - (Page 40)

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// 21 tornados struck Georgia in March 2007, the Sumter Regional Hospital in Americus, along with many homes and businesses, was devastated. This meant not only the temporary loss of the place of refuge and caring on which the city’s residents relied, but also that a major regional employer was essentially knocked out of business. The staff at Sumter, after ensuring the safe transfer of 60 patients to other hospitals and relief to the storm’s injured—remarkably there were no fatalities at the hospital—began the process of assessing what was left of their facility and what they could do with it. An F-3 tornado, with winds up to 206 mph, had blown out windows and torn off sections of the roof. Brick walls and debris had destroyed their MRI unit. As had occurred in many buildings during Hurricane Katrina, the rain and water intrusion of the storm created an additional concern. Wet interior building materials meant the possibility of electrical hazard, and mold and mildew made the facility untenable. Ultimately, everything removed from the facility needed to be sterilized before being re-used in patient care areas. The day after the storm, temporary tents were in place to serve urgent care functions, complete with generator-driven lights and power. The big challenge, apart from just being operational, was getting enough data service bandwidth to accommodate transmitting X-ray imaging files to remote radiologists. Many hospitals outsource these specialty services. Within a month, modular buildings were laid out onsite to allow more hospital functions to be restored and more staff back in action. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provided much of the funding for a temporary facility, with modular interlocking trailers called COGIN units built in Italy and shipped through Houston to the site, after depletion of the available stockpile of units FEMA had in Alabama. As the concrete pad from which to start, they used the slab of their demolished medical office building. The temporary facility grew to more than 300 modules, condensing an approximately 250,000-sq.-ft hospital into to their mission, have taught others how to survive another day. Oklahoma: Broken Arrow During the ice storm that hit Oklahoma in December 2007, the St. John Health System in Tulsa experienced a power outage that swept the entire region for many days. During this time, authorities discovered compromises and shortcomings in their facility-wide emergency power system. Design is underway for a new satellite hospital and medical office building in the Broken Arrow area for St. John Health System. With the pain of the recent ice storm still fresh, the design team is challenged to provide a method to provide auxiliary emergency power even to non-critical systems to avoid such a catastrophe in the future. The cost of permanently installed generators to service critical and non-critical loads for the entire facility was found to be cost- and space-prohibitive. Engineers devised a method of configuring the normal power system such that connection points are located on the exterior of the central plant where a temporary standby emergency generator (such as those located on a flat-bed trailer) can be pulled up to the plant and connected quickly to the hospital’s power distribution system. This design is independent of the code-required emergency power system for critical and life safety systems and in no way interferes with the operation of that system. This approach affords the security of full backup power without the prohibitive cost of installing and maintaining the required equipment on a permanent basis. All of these case studies show that proper disaster preparedness planning during the design phase can go a long way toward keeping hospitals up and running when we need them most. Sheerin is director of healthcare design in TLC’s Orlando office; Ferris is an electrical engineer, also based in the Orlando office; Kemp is division director of the Nashville office; Worth is senior mechanical engineer and Versluys is senior electrical engineer, both with the Jacksonville office. Hurricane Wilma struck in 2005, collapsing a generator room wall in a Florida hospital. Photo: TLC Engineering fewer than 70,000 sq. ft, and creating an 80bed, fully functioning hospital in less than six months. It is expected to be in use for three years until a new replacement “brick and mortar” hospital can be designed and built. Apart from fitting it out with MEP systems for specific hospital functions, an ongoing strain has been putting adequate phone and data in place to provide access to electronic medical records, electronic medication systems, and relocated functions. Billing services were backed up for more than two months due to network system and computer availability. On a parallel path to creating a temporary facility was the process of determining a longterm permanent replacement hospital. With the current buildings constructed in 1953, 1975, and 1999, designers determined that the costs of refurbishing and bringing them up to code would be comparable to building a new architecturally efficient and energy-efficient facility, one that would resolve issues of patient flow and adjacency. Though still in the planning stages, there is little doubt that disaster preparedness will be a top priority in the hospital’s design decision-making process. This will include hardening protection of tele/data systems, wind-loading and impact protection, concern for the roof system and roof-mounted equipment, and planning flexible use of areas. They have learned some hard lessons, and through improvisation, perseverance, and commitment 40 Consulting-Specifying Engineer • JUNE 2008

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Consulting-Specifying Engineer - June 2008 Contents Viewpoint Letters News M/E Roundtable No Gambling Allowed on Smoke Control in Las Vegas Be Prepared: Hospital Protections for Catastrophic Events Ready for Retail Commissioning Documents: Necessary Evil Codes & Standards Codes & Standards Case Study Equipment Lifecycles New Products Advertiser Index Green Space

Consulting-Specifying Engineer - June 2008

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