Overall Winner: UMUCH Bel Air Bed Tower

The renovation of the University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Health (UMUCH) facility in Bel Air was nothing short of massive.

The 2.5 year, $62 million project included construction of a three-story, 78,000-square-foot addition on top of an existing, active cancer treatment center, installation of new equipment and piping in the 20,000-square-foot central utility plant, and a 36,000-square-foot expansion and phased renovation of the hospital’s garden level to improve the emergency department, kitchen, dining room and support services area. And all of that construction had to be completed without disrupting hospital operations.

To avoid any disruptions, the project team headed by Wohlsen Construction held weekly design team meetings with the owner to coordinate all activities. Wohlsen which assigned four superintendents to the project and multiple project managers and project engineers, also sustained ongoing, detailed communications with representatives of project team members, ranging from vice presidents, project executives, project managers and engineers through to superintendents, foremen, craftspeople and laborers.

Team members repeatedly improved sequencing and phasing plans to best support hospital operations. The decision to add extra phases to the garden-level renovation, for example, ensured that the kitchen could remain open at all times to serve patients, staff and others.
Faced with a complex job in a sensitive environment, superintendents frequently wrote their own requests for information and simultaneously offered potential solutions that would help with constructability and ensure an excellent finished product.

Erecting the three-story bed tower on top of the Kaufman Cancer Center presented a huge challenge. After placing two cranes on site, crews worked nights to erect the steel structure and pour concrete slabs. The team also planned and timed especially noisy work – such as tying into existing rebar, stairwells and elevator shafts – to minimize impact on the hospital.

Upgrades to the central utility plant posed other challenges. The MEP scope included installing 21 pumps, 17 supply and exhaust fans, four air curtains, four split systems, a cabinet unit heater, approximately 90 VFCs, three air handlers, four cooling towers, two boilers and two chillers.

In addition to managing major installations and limiting outages in an active hospital, the project team also had to overcome the extraordinary challenge of connecting new piping systems to the cooling towers.

“We had main supply and return pipes about 20 inches in diameter, but no valves that would allow us to shut them off,” said Joseph Fries, Project Manager with Wohlsen Construction.

Consequently, connecting the new equipment would have required the team “to shut down the whole system and drain it,” Fries said. “But to drain hundreds of thousands of gallons of refrigerant would have taken days.”

The project’s MEP coordinator and mechanical subcontractor, James Craft & Son, warned that process raised the potential of leaving the hospital campus without a cooling system for weeks. So, the MEP professionals proposed an alternate and uncommon path, namely freezing the supply and return pipes before working on them.

“We brought in a tractor trailer of liquid nitrogen, put a metal jacket around the pipes and ran liquid nitrogen around the pipes to freeze them to about negative 80 degress Fahrenheit,” Fries said. “Once they were frozen, we welded in some values that we could use to connect to the new system. We still had to shut down the entire cooling system but it was only a one-day outage and the guys worked their tails off to get it done as quickly as possible. Nobody wanted to see what might happen if we ran out of liquid nitrogen before the work was done.”

Not only did the project team deliver an extremely complex project on schedule without interrupting hospital operations, they also kept the quality of work extremely high, even in places where it couldn’t be seen.

“A sign of good craftsmanship is how the piping and ductwork is installed,” said Andrew Hooker, Project Executive at Wohlsen Construction. The crew from James Craft & Son, which won a Craftsmanship Award for their work on UMUCH, “did beautiful work, regardless of whether or not it was going to remain exposed. The work was exemplary even above existing ceilings and mechanical space that obviously had tighter restrictions.”