Some of the land on the proposed site of the new hospital on U.S. 54 “is as bad as I’ve ever seen,” said David Wright, architect of the project, while other parcels “are doable.”
A host of engineers and architects addressed a capacity crowd Tuesday night at a meeting of the Allen County Hospital trustees.
Their findings of particularly unstable soil in the center of the 17 acres led them to reconfigure the position of the hospital to the northeast portion while still allowing for a Veterans Affairs clinic and a medical arts building.
Phil Schultze, construction engineer with Murray Construction, estimated an additional $450,000 to the project would be needed to accommodate building in less-than-perfect conditions. If the hospital were dead center in the site, it would cost an additional $1.3 million, he said, “with a big contingency of maybe a million more.”
A STUDY of 32 borings conducted on the 14 acres available to the engineers gave them a representative picture of what lies beneath the site that has long been abused by a host of manufacturers long before the days of the Environmental Protection Agency.
“We understood there was some kind of pit,” Wright said of a section of the site. “What we didn’t know was that it would be 25 feet deep.”
Inside the pit is “sand, slag, clay, water, debris, concrete, wood. It’s better to say what’s not in there,” said Steve Pretsch, an engineer with the environmental firm Terracon.
Pretsch and his crew conducted “blow counts,” where a device is rammed into the ground to see where it meets resistance. One blow count typically goes 1.5 feet deep, Pretsch said. After plunging through 25 feet “of muck,” they hit bedrock.
That pretty much eliminates the land at center in the site for the hospital.
The rest of the site, however, “has somewhat similar fill,” with bedrock 12-14 feet below surface, Wright said.
“The northeast corner of the site is a lot less trouble,” Schultze said.
Schultze said building the hospital on a series of stone columns would provide a stable base. The columns are filled with alternating layers of crushed rock and sand. He referred to the hospital in Osage Beach, Mo., that is built in a similar fashion. The four-story building stands on 80 stone columns. It was built “six to seven years ago,” Schultz said, and has not reported any problems. “It’s a fairly common technique,” he said.
Engineers concentrated their efforts on the 10 acres they thought most likely for the hospital. Architect Wright said the least stable land in the center would be good for “green space,” and a buffer between the highway and the 60,000-square-foot hospital.
The new design for the hospital allows for expansion to the east and west, “where the soil is still good,” Wright said.
“We feel confident we can solve issues within the building of the hospital, though it is a difficult site to work with,” he said.
ENGINEERS prefer a uniform — and solid — base on which to build. The way the hospital is now configured requires a small section of one of its parking lots to be on top of the unstable soil. Part of the additional expense of building there will be to purchase gravel to form a 2-foot base under the parking lot.
“That’s the area of your greatest risk,” Schultze said.
The stone columns will be sitting on limestone. “That’s not going to move,” he said.
Trustee Sean McReynolds, who participated in the meeting via telephone, asked the architect if positioning the hospital in the northeast quadrant of the site “still leaves the ground aesthetically and functionally as a medical campus.”
Wright responded in the affirmative. “It’s only a little more challenging getting access to the back of the hospital,” in this configuration. Utilities will also have to be extended a bit more than if the hospital were in the center of the site.
So far, trustees have directed almost $12,000 to conduct the soil borings. Schultze requested some more borings to further delineate its composition. When trustees hesitated on approving the action, he said, “even if you opt for a new site, that, too, would require a whole new round of soil borings.” The additional tests, he said, would decide once and for all whether building on U.S. 54 is the right decision.
Trustees opted to postpone the decision by one week.
Trustee Jay Kretzmeier said he would be more confident if he had the assurance that developers of a medical arts building were still on board with the project now that the soil findings have been released.
Trustees will next meet at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
