Mercy Readies Tornado-Tough $450M Joplin Hospital

Two years after an EF5 tornado flattened Joplin, MO and gutted St. John's Regional Medical Center, the new Mercy Hospital Joplin is being built to stand strong against natural disasters with a host of upgrades. Storm-hardened windows will be the facility's centerpiece.

May 22 marks the second anniversary of the devastating EF5 tornado that flattened Joplin, MO, left 161 people dead and injured more than 1,000 people.

The town of about 50,500 souls plans to honor its dead and commemorate the catastrophe at a public ceremony that will include a moment of silence at 5:41 p.m., marking the minute in 2011 when the twister first touched down on the western edge of the town and began its devastating tear.

While the ceremony will honor what the region lost on that horrible day, Joplin city planners say they will use the event to highlight the progress made in rebuilding and to subtly shift the focus toward the future. Rebuilding and looking to the future are also the focus at the new Mercy Hospital Joplin, which is planning a March 2015 opening for the $450 million, 900,000-square-foot, 260-bed hospital that will replace the storm-gutted St. John's Regional Medical Center.

Despite the quick thinking and valiant efforts of St. John's staff two years ago, five patients and one visitor inside the hospital died from injuries and other storm-related factors when the tornado blew out windows, peeled off the roof, and shut down electrical power, back-up generators, and communications.

Immediately after the storm a team of engineers used the unique circumstances provided by the catastrophe to comb the gutted hospital and identify the weak links.

"We arrived a day after the storm and it took us three or four weeks just to assess the damage, make sure the facility was safe to go into, and document all of the issues that the facility had," says John Farnen, who is overseeing the new hospital construction as Mercy's executive director of strategic projects.

"We lost all the power. No utilities. No emergency generator power. We lost the roof and exposed the outside. It was catastrophic damage. They got maybe a 10-minute warning and it was [in] a matter of seconds that it blew past."

Mercy Hospital Joplin is being built with an eye toward those lessons learned at St. John's and includes $11 million in upgrades to "harden" the new hospital against natural disasters, all of which will add about 2% to the total construction cost.

The centerpiece of the storm hardening will be the windows, most of which were knocked out at St. John's and which sent glass shards and 200 mph winds inside the building, blowing out walls, doors and ceilings. The only windows to survive the 2011 tornado were those with a reinforced laminate in the hospital's behavioral health unit, which limited damage and injury inside that unit.

With that lesson learned, Mercy is working with contractors to invent windows and frames with unprecedented strength. "The new window technology actually doesn't exist. We are doing testing right now to get it to pass and achieve our goals, but most of the hardening is just [applying] the good engineering practices in today's world," Farnen says.

The new hospital will have three types of storm-hardened windows. Lobbies and other public areas that can be evacuated quickly will have windows with a rating for 110 mph winds, stronger than the typical 90 mph rating for commercial buildings. Mercy is adding a film of plastic laminate to prevent the glass from shattering. Patient rooms will have laminated glass designed to withstand winds of 140 mph. For the intensive care unit, technicians in Minnesota are developing windows that will withstand impact from a 15-pound, 2x4 wooden missiles at 100 mph, which replicates debris flying in a 250-mph tornado.

"There is a field-applied safety laminate [that] will stand up a lot better than normal glass," Farnen says. "It will keep the glass from breaking up into shards and flying all over so that if the glass does give, the whole piece will pop out and it doesn't become a weapon or projectiles flying through the air."

When tornado warnings are issued, hospital staff will move patients and visitors into the interior.

"Every floor of this hospital will have a center core area where the ceilings will be reinforced and the interior walls will be reinforced and the end of the core area will have metal storm doors," Farnen says. "Everybody who can be moved will be moved into the center core area. The patients that can't move, that is where we have the 250 mph graded glass and we will defend those in place."  

Other notable upgrades include:

• Refuges on each floor with reinforced walls and ceilings, where tiles and lights are secured as if in an earthquake zone, with heavy storm barriers that can be closed to secure the safe zones. Rods in the door hardware will penetrate into the cement above to hold against intense gusts. Elevators will reach the basement where widened corridors can safely hold staff and patients.
• A half-buried building to house emergency generators and diesel tanks, and a reinforced 450-foot tunnel that will provide a conduit for water, power, gas, and data communications lines. Hallways and stairwells will have battery-operated backup lights. Life-support systems such as ventilators and neonatal bassinets will have battery backup systems.
• Emergency grab bags strategically placed around the hospital and containing critical supplies such as flashlights, batteries, first aid kits, gloves, crowbars and even snow shovels to clear passageways clogged with rain-soaked debris.
• A storm-hardened pre-cast concrete exterior with a poured concrete roof that will hold tight in a gale, unlike the metal decking that blew off the old hospital, and a penthouse holding mechanical units that will be protected by heavy walls of water-proof boards.

Storm hardening is taking place at Mercy hospitals in Springfield, and Oklahoma City, and it's planned for other hospitals with the misfortune of being located along Tornado Alley.

Farnen says the storm-hardening will protect patients, visitors, and staff and will also ensure that Mercy Hospital Joplin will be the last light on for emergency services.

"There is an awful lot of stuff we learned and an awful lot of stuff we are doing and it will be interesting to see how well the facility performs when all of these elements come together and hold up together when they're all assembled," he says. "Saving patients lives is priority No. 1, but if we can keep the building intact that's great too."