Posted Jul 20, 2024, 8:38 PM
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Join Date: Dec 2015
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Quote:
A sixth-floor skybridge connecting two towers at the new St. Paul’s Hospital now under construction in Vancouver’s False Creek Flats offers a good perspective of the $2.18 billion project’s scale.
The walls of the east and west towers soar to their 60-metre heights to form a canyon with views that stretch out to the slopes of Mount Pleasant and the North Shore mountains.
“That’s intentional,” Bruce Norman, project director for the project’s builder, PCL Constructors Westcoast, told Postmedia during an exclusive tour this week.
Along with the E-shape of the east tower and deep light wells in the west tower, the design maximizes exposure to natural light, which is essential to patients and a signature feature of what will become a sprawling multi-block health-care campus.
Crews recently “topped out” the project’s east tower, putting on its top floor, hitting a midway-point milestone for the facility that is supposed to open in 2027 with 548 beds in individual patient rooms — twice the size of the existing St. Paul’s Hospital on Burrard Street.
The new St. Paul’s site was a hive of activity on a sweltering weekday — ironworkers on the upper floors of the west tower welded steel structures for the facility’s extensive mechanical systems, while electricians and mechanical tradespeople rapidly installed equipment on the lower floors.
Massive two-storey heating, ventilation and air-conditioning units now occupy the west tower’s cavernous fourth floor. They are being connected to 3½-metre tall main ducts, which were prefabricated off-site and dropped in by crane during an earlier stage of construction.
“You could run a race in there,” Norman said.
There are some 1,400 skilled tradespeople working on the site now, Norman said, with about 800 of them split between electricians and HVAC mechanical trades. That should ramp up to peak employment of 1,600 in the next few months.
PCL also won the contract to build a separate clinical support and research centre on the campus, to be attached by a skybridge, which is expected to start construction in January.
B.C. is building a lot of hospitals right now, so Providence Health Care’s senior manager on-site hesitated to call the new St. Paul’s a prototype.
Kevin Little said health authorities are all learning from each other as each of them build or upgrade hospitals, whether it is renovations at the Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver or new facilities at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster.
The project’s lead contractor is also testing a lot of advanced construction technology, including Roomba-like robots being used at night to draw lines on concrete floors showing the location of interior walls from detailed computerized models and an artificial-intelligence brd system that helps track production progress.
“Everything you see on site is modelled down right to the bolt,” Norman said.
There is a necessity to that, Norman explained. It causes problems if there are conflicts between components, such as a water pipe meeting up with a ventilation duct as construction is proceeding.
“We’ll have 10 tradespeople out there looking at each other (wondering) what do we do next?” Norman said.
“(So) everything is already plotted, we know exactly where it’s meant to be and all our superintendents carry the models,” he added.
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https://vancouversun.com/news/new-st-pauls-hospital-project-hits-milestone
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