Construction Update
September 26, 2007

View the photo gallery of the construction process.

Site, Parking & Access

Trans Associates has completed preliminary survey work on East Jefferson Street to determine the next steps in moving forward with a new main roadway to the hospital from Route 68. Once construction begins on our hospital site, parking will be somewhat disrupted for some of our patients. We are exploring the possibility of valet parking to serve patients with needs.

Nixon Sarver Demolition

We'll be staging the renovation a little differently than originally planned, given some of the departments that need to move internally. We will begin the on campus process with the renovation and expansion of the Emergency Department this winter, followed by the demolition of the Nixon Sarver building in early spring. Turner Construction, the General Contractor selected for the project, will coordinate this activity since the Nixon Sarver site will be the location of the tower.

Planning & Programming

Kurt Salmon Associates (KSA) wrapped up the third and final round of planning and programming on September 12, 13 and 14. This round is referred to as the Gaming Session round, where the User Groups participated in a gaming exercise that allowed them to move shapes on scaled drawings to see how things fit in their various areas. In addition, we held three focus groups with community members: one for former surgical patients, one for former medical patients and one for former ER patients. We gleaned lots of information from them about what they would like to see and how our new hospital could address their needs.

All of these components are now turned over to HGA, one-half of our architect design team, who will take the final program planning document and begin putting design concepts to it.

Other Activities

In the next several weeks, drilling rigs will once again appear on campus, this time to do comprehensive drilling to obtain geological soil samples for the tower site on the Nixon Sarver side of the campus. These samples will be analyzed and the report will be turned over to the structural engineer, who will use it to begin the design of the foundations for the tower.

General Contractor/Design Engineers

Turner Construction of Pittsburgh has been selected as the General Contractor/Construction Manager for the project. The rest of the design team is beginning to take shape as well, with HGA being selected for the mechanical, electrical, plumbing and structural engineering component of the project.