mercy hospital joplin mo 5th floor room 540

Hurricane-rated precast concrete exterior walls will make the facade of Mercy sturdier than most brick, metal or plastered walls.Įach floor of the hospital will have special hallways designated as safe zones, with reinforced walls, ceilings and lighting. There will be no rocks on Mercy’s new roof, but a protective layer of lightweight concrete is being incorporated into the roofing scheme. That is the motivation behind our efforts in Joplin, which aim to not only keep occupants alive during an EF-5 tornado, but actually keep the hospital operational after the event.” “But there is one ‘never’ event that is harder to control: A hospital full of patients should never be reduced to rubble in a matter of minutes. “In medical circles, there is a lot of talk about ‘never’ events - referring to things that should never happen in a hospital, like a surgeon operating on the wrong limb,” Felton said. John’s, a regional hospital that served nearly 700,000 people before the storm, was inoperable. Injured Joplin residents were arriving in the parking lot, but St. “You can’t imagine the shattering that goes on when you have materials exposed to that kind of wind.” “There was debris on top of people, on top of us, walls in, doors in, door frames in…” one survivor told investigators. Rubble, toppled furniture and flooded hallways created hazards for more than 200 patients, visitors and staff trying to evacuate in total darkness, wrote the NIST, an agency within the Commerce Department.

The damaged exterior resulted in a “complete loss of control over the interior environment,” investigators with the National Institute of Standards and Technology wrote in a recent report examining the 2011 tornado. “They were being shot right through the patient room windows.” “Those actually turned into projectiles during the tornado,” Felton said of the gravel. The electrical plant and backup generators will be housed in a bunkerlike structure away from the main building.Ī blanket of rock, with some pieces the size of a golf ball, was used to weigh down the roof on the old hospital, which was built in 1965. A concrete tunnel, the length of one-and-a-half football fields, will protect utility lines from severe weather. When the hospital is complete next March, there will be two lines of power, water and data communications coming from different directions in case one fails. “The Mercy Joplin hospital team’s goal was to design and construct a facility that provided a safe environment for patients, staff and visitors from a direct hit by an EF-3 or greater tornado,” Felton said.Ībout $11 million of Mercy’s $350 million in construction costs is being spent on storm-hardening upgrades. Even stronger windows, designed to endure winds up to 250 mph, will be used in intensive care units. Windows in the new patient rooms will be able to withstand winds of 140 mph. Fifteen-pound wooden studs were shot at the glass to see if the windows would hold up. So hospital officials and McCarthy worked with a manufacturer to assemble breakage-resistant windows. The only ones to survive the 2011 storm were the reinforced windows in the behavioral health unit.

The most visible and costliest upgrade will be Mercy’s windows. “It’s designed to withstand a tornado,” said Ryan Felton, project director with McCarthy Building Companies, the firm constructing the new facility, which will be known as Mercy Hospital Joplin. With any luck, Joplin will never have another tragedy like the mile-wide, 200-mph twister that killed 158 people, including six at the battered hospital.īut with southwest Missouri often in the crosshairs during storm season, the team building the new hospital isn’t taking chances.

Mercy hospital joplin mo 5th floor room 540