Featured Construction Stories
The New Main Hospital Keeps Growing and Growing and Growing – December 2009
Most of structural steel columns, beams and metal floor deck are now installed. By early January, the 12th and 13th floors will be completed and the steel will be “topped out.” The smaller tower crane will be “stretched” 134 more feet which will make it 321 feet tall. The iron workers have been very busy this month and have been working some extended hours to keep things on schedule. Even though the weather is beginning to get more challenging, work on the columns, beams, metal deck and a significant amount of welding continue each day.
Concrete is being poured on floors seven through 10 and the required fireproofing of the beams and columns will begin.
Some of the glass panels will be installed soon, giving all of us a good glimpse of how the building will appear when it is complete. Extensive testing has been done on a typical window that will be installed in the building to verify the performance of the window under very cold conditions, so that we are assured of minimal heat loss and condensation.
We are now preparing the space in front of the new main hospital for a two-level, underground visitor’s garage. The garage will be directly connected to the hospital by tunnels accessible to patients, families and visitors. The garage will be the length of two football fields and hold 425 cars.
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| A view of the east stair tower. | A mock up window was recently tested using liquid nitrogen to mimic cold conditions. The windows showed minimal heat loss and condensation. |
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Aerial view of the site (provided by Turner Construction). |
Steel Beam Signing and a View from the New Main Hospital Seventh Floor
Over the past couple months, hundreds of employees, patients and families signed steel beams that will be part of the new main hospital. These beams will be hoisted into place in mid-January. Check out these videos showing one of the steel beams being signed and a view from the seventh floor of the new main hospital.
Family Dollar Relocating to 865 Parsons Avenue:
Family Dollar, CVS and Wendy’s are preparing to vacate their current spaces in the old Kroger’s plaza to allow for construction of our new Research III building. Family Dollar will be moving to a new building at 865 Parsons Avenue and CVS is moving across Livingston Avenue to the old Bobb Chevrolet site. Plans for Wendy’s are unconfirmed.
Nationwide Children’s partnered with Family Dollar to design and construct their new 8,100 square feet retail space at the corner of Parsons and Kossuth. The hospital embraced the opportunity to assist in providing an asset to the community on Parsons Avenue south of our Campus. The new store improves a site previously occupied by a vacant structure that was an eyesore and dangerous to neighbors. The new building is brick and looks as though it’s been part of Parson’s Avenue for many years. The store neighbors the Parson’s branch of the Columbus Public Library and is pedestrian friendly to benefit the surrounding residential neighborhoods. The store will open in late January 2010.
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Family Dollar as seen traveling North on Parsons Avenue. |
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Family Dollar from the entrance of the library. |
Street Name Change
The portion of the street between Livingston Avenue and the main hospital entrance you know as Ann Street recently received a new name. Following a requirement from the City of Columbus to change the name, and to help patient families navigate our campus more easily, the street was renamed Children’s Gateway. This doesn’t affect Ann Street south of Livingston Avenue, just the portion of the street on the hospital campus.
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Installing the new street sign. |
The finished product. |
Creating Additional Beds
The new main hospital will fulfill a need for additional space to care for children. We need to be creative in making the best of our current space.
In the meantime, here are three examples of departments renovating to make additional room:
- Neurosciences Unit on A5W: minor renovations to accommodate five intermediate care PICU beds (with capacity to increase to 10 if needed). Project completed in early November of 2009.
- Hemoc Unit on J5: renovate J5 to accommodate Day Hospital relocation from C5. Project completed in mid-November of 2009.
- Acute care beds on C5: add restrooms and modify existing rooms/systems for five additional acute care beds. Completion slated for January of 2010.
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Before picture of a new restroom on C5. |
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After picture of a new restroom on C5. |
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New two bay treatment room on J5. |
Topping Out the New Main Hospital
Earlier this year, the contractors met another major milestone date. We witnessed the topping off of the last piece of steel above the 12th floor. Several special steel beams were set aside for families, patients, and Nationwide Children's Hospital employees to sign. These beams were installed on the upper floors of the building. The milestone date was recognized by a brief ceremony held out in front of the building as the last piece of signed steel was lifted up to its permanent home with the customary pine tree and American flag attached.
Want more? Look to the right of this page for exclusive coverage.
Fire Alarms: Why So Many? Why So Loud?
As a hospital, we are held to a high set of criteria when it comes to safety. Fire drills must be carried out to ensure staff and visitors understand the emergency fire action plan, to evaluate effectiveness of the plan and to identify any weakness in the evacuation strategy. The frequency of the drills varies for each area of the hospital and reflects the level of risk. Since Nationwide Children's is a 24 hour business, the hospital needs to test at a variety of times, several times a year. Safety/Engineering will inform staff prior to a drill when possible, however this isn't always permitted.
The hospital attempts to schedule testing around the best time for each department, however, some of the testing must be witnessed by the city inspector and fire marshal, so the timing is around their schedule. They require two tests per device and Joint Commission requires one annual test for every device (currently we over 3000 in the hospital including the audio visual devices that emit the audible alarms). Where possible, loudspeaker messages are made to give some advance notification. Patient floor drills will normally be scheduled when there are fewer visitors on the premises.
Engineering continues to monitor the decibels of the fire alarms. By law, they have to be within a decibel range, and we verify they are in that range.
Some patient sensitive areas with medical justification are granted exception because of the nature of their business. For example, testing in the neonatal intensive care unit would not be a good idea.
Opening Our New MRI Suite
Unique to only a few hospitals in North America, Nationwide Children’s is opening a new MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) suite. Usually MRIs are used in one room only. This one is built on a track system that allows it to move between a couple rooms. On one side of the suite, the magnet can travel into a neurosurgical operating room where Nationwide Children’s neurosurgeions perform highly specialized, life-saving operations. On the other side, the MRI can travel into another room for non-operative diagnostic imaging. You can see it through this gallery of images.
New Main Hospital Construction – March Update
More and more activities are beginning within the new building. As iron workers progress toward completing their finish details of miscellaneous welding and bolting the last structural pieces of the building, another group such as “the wire pullers” arrive to begin pulling the electrical cable through an extensive maze of conduits on multiple floors. Installation of various mechanical piping running up and thru the building is in full swing too including hot and chilled water piping, roof storm piping, plumbing water supply lines, and fire protection sprinkler pipes. The outside of the building, made up of pre-cast concrete panels and aluminum framed glass curtain wall, continues to be lifted into place each day as well.
Some of the last concrete pours for the 14th floor (roof level), helipad, roof elevator lobby roof slab, and the 4th & 5th floor connecting bridge floors will be completed in March.
In April, the actual installation of the roofing on the building will begin. Also in April (no fooling), the two large tower cranes will be dismantled after all of the major lifts have been completed. Then, the excavation of the new underground visitor’s garage will begin.
The consulting engineers and the contractors use a fairly new computer program system to input all of the mechanical supply ducts, plumbing piping, significant electrical conduit, fire protection piping, and many other items into a 3D picture of the entire building so that conflicts can be averted or planned around. Many times in the design and construction of a building, a problem or conflict isn’t found until it’s too late. In our new building, all of the contractors and design professionals are sharing up to date information of what is planned in a specific area so that all the mechanical, electrical, fire protection, finish ceilings, beams, columns, you name it……, get installed correctly. So, not only will the new building have state of the art medical equipment, we are also using state of the art construction techniques.
Maps and Directions
For maps and directions to Nationwide Children’s Hospital, click here.
