Project Profile: Frederick Health
Scope of work:
70,000-square-foot hospital renovation and addition
BC&E Member companies involved:
Gilbane Building Company
Emjay Engineering & Construction Co.
Floors Etc.
The scope of work for the Frederick Health project was already daunting enough. It would require Gilbane Building Company and its project partners to complete a gut renovation of 31,000 square feet of the existing Emergency Department (ED) space and deliver a 39,548-square-foot addition, including 13,263 square feet built overtop of active hospital space. The team would have to build a new Pediatric Emergency Department (including eight treatment rooms, one trauma room and five inpatient rooms), nine new ED behavioral health treatment rooms, a new 20-bed Intensive Care Unit and a three-lab cardiac catheterization suite.
Then weather and Covid-19 made work even more complicated.
As Tropical Storm Ida neared Maryland in August 2021, the team implimented storm mitigation strategies to protect the addition which had structure, but no façade. Personnel from Gilbane, a trade contractor and the hospital, from facilities staff to the vice president of support services, “all manned the fort to make sure we kept the rain out of the building,” said Ryan Becker, Gilbane Project Manager. “This one event showed the level of teamwork and commitment it has taken from everyone involved to successfully complete this project.”
As Ida dropped eight inches of rain on the region in two hours, “there was water cascading across the slab. But we had people manning a squeegee line and others managing sump pumps. We had hospital administration offering to run shop vacs to contain the water,” Becker said.
That kind of teamwork enabled the project to overcome other major hurdles. Pandemic-induced supply chain delays meant the team had to wait 14 months to obtain the roofing system for the second-story addition.
Gilbane and subcontractors devised “a very innovative plan to temporarily waterproof the concrete roof structure and parapet so construction could progress,” he said. “We framed walls for the new ICU, started all MEP rough-in and eventually got confident enough in this temporary solution to start hanging drywall and putting finishes in place to deliver this space on schedule.”
To safeguard ongoing hospital operations and enable Frederick Health to maintain treatment capacity, the team was involved early in the design process and conducted thorough phasing discussions focused on maintaining hospital bed counts, MEP installations, and other constructability items. This planning led the team to divide the project into four phases.
To ensure that construction, including installation of complex MEP systems and medical equipment, proceeded efficiently and with minimal errors, the team conducted extensive BIM coordination and employed other construction technology.
“Before any slabs were poured, we put all of our anchors on the formwork and we didn’t use the old, manual way to drill and set anchors after the concrete was poured,” Becker said. The process which proved both highly efficient and accurate, “was all coordinated with GPS. Nobody was pulling tape measures.”
The construction team also coordinated extensively with medical equipment suppliers to ensure that installations went smoothly in especially complex parts of the hospital, such as the new cardiac cath labs.
The result of those efforts is the project — which is nearing the end of phase four — is expected to wrap up 15 days early this winter.