Sonoma County hospitals will stand up to quakes

At the turn of the century, a quarter of Sonoma County’s hospital-related buildings posed a significant risk of collapse in the event of a major earthquake. That’s 14 of 50 hospital structures.

Today there are none, thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent on hospital retrofits, renovations and complete rebuilds.

Sonoma County is not alone. Statewide, 89 percent of acute care hospital buildings - 2,650 structures - would likely remain standing after a strong earthquake or other natural disaster, according to data released this month by the Office of Statewide Health Planning & Development, or OSHPD.

By comparison, in 2001 only 61 percent of hospital buildings could have withstood a strong earthquake without collapsing, OSHPD officials said.

“It’s a big deal in the sense that we’ve made progress,” said Hussain Bhatia, supervisor of OSHPD’s seismic safety compliance unit. “It was slow going initially, but we’re making progress.”

By strong earthquake, OSHPD means something that is much bigger than last year’s temblor in Napa. Hussain said that there were several hospital buildings in Napa with the lowest seismic rating and they did not collapse.

The earthquake, he said, “wasn’t strong enough or long enough.”

State seismic safety requirements date to early 1973, when state lawmakers enacted legislation following the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, a moderate 6.6 shaker in San Fernando Valley that brought down two hospitals, killing 47 people.

The Alquist Hospital Seismic Safety Act required hospitals to be designed and constructed to withstand a major earthquake. The state expected that old hospitals would gradually be replaced by newer structures built to seismic safety standards and that by 2000, most hospitals would be up to code.

That didn’t happen. For years after 1973, older hospitals continued to be used. After the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the Alquist Act was expanded to require all hospitals to be free from the risk of collapse during a big earthquake.

The deadline of 2008 was extended by the Legislature over the years and is now 2020, said Bhatia.

OSHPD has five structural performance categories, or SPC ratings, ranging from SPC 1 to SPC 5. A rating of SPC 1 is assigned to buildings that may be at risk of collapse during a strong earthquake, while a rating of SPC 5 means the building is reasonably capable of providing services to the public following a strong earthquake.

In 2001, the biggest seismic risk, in terms of the risk of building collapse, was the Sutter Medical Center campus on Chanate Road, where 5 of 6 hospital structures had an SPC 1 rating. At the Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital campus, 3 of 12 structures had an SPC 1 rating.

Tom Minard, Sutter Health’s program manager, said only the utility plant, built in 1990, had a seismically compliant rating. Minard said that in 2000, hospital officials created a master plan to determine what it would take to upgrade buildings to an SPC 5 rating.

“There were so many other problems with the Chanate location, even if you could do all the structural reinforcement,” he said. “It would have taken 10 years and multiple phases in renovation while you were trying to keep patient care going in the hospital.”

That would have been very difficult to juggle, he said, and it would have required major changes to the existing structures, including removal of exterior pieces of buildings to install more steel braces.

The new building on Mark West Springs Road is built to an SPC 5 rating. The building’s thick concrete foundation was built on compacted soil in response to the location’s alluvial soil, said Minard.

“On any part of the building you’re standing on, there’s 15 feet of concrete on a solid mass of ground that was extremely compacted and can handle the wave motion in the alluvial soil,” he said.

“The building itself is not one building but three different buildings,” he said. “When a wave comes, the buildings move and shake between each section, the pipes flex.”

St. Joseph Health, which runs Santa Rosa’s Memorial Hospital, had to make some tough decisions to bring Memorial’s campus structures, including the main hospital, out of ?SPC 1 ratings.

For example, the catheterization lab that was built in 2002 as an addition to an existing hospital structure had to be torn down because it caused problems in earthquake modeling tests. The addition was causing “over-stressing” of the existing structure, said Jim Bostick, vice president of operations for Petra Integrated Construction Strategies, which was formerly St. Joseph’s in-house design and construction division.

The main building, which is called the center east wing, received concrete reinforcement to existing shear walls and the foundation, Bostick said. Of course, the hospital’s new emergency department expansion was built to SPC 5 standards, he added.

A new Frank R. Howard Memorial Hospital is slated to be open later this spring in Willits, about 1 mile from the city’s old hospital. The old hospital complex had four SPC 1 ratings and five SPC 2 ratings. An SPC 2 rating is assigned to buildings that do not jeopardize life but may not be repairable or functional after a strong earthquake.

The new hospital will be a two-story, 74,000-square-foot, state of the art, critical-access facility, with 21 medical surgical patient beds and four ICU beds. It will meet or exceed OSHPD’s SPC 5 rating, hospital officials said.

Aside from OSHPD seismic structure ratings, the agency also has a ratings system for what’s inside a hospital. This rating is called the nonstructural performance category, or NPC, and deals with such things as anchoring and bracing of communications, emergency power supply, medical gas, fire suppression and emergency lighting systems.

“NPC is the stuff inside your building,” said Clark Austin, facilities director at Palm Drive Hospital.

Palm Drive, which was built after the 1973 Alquist Act, maintains four SPC 3 ratings; and a radiology addition has an SPC 4 rating. But the hospital has numerous NPC 1 ratings.

Austin said that 10 years ago, Palm Drive Hospital officials did an inventory of NPC work that needed to be done. The hospital has been conducting the work since then, including putting extra bracing on the emergency generator, placing seismic anchors on the emergency radio systems, telephone systems, main electrical switch gear and added additional exit lighting.

Austin said that about 95 percent of the work required to bring the hospital out of its NPC 1 rating has been completed.

“What we’re doing right now is odds and ends,” said Austin. “As soon as the state signs off, it ?would be rated at 2 in the ?nonstructural category.”

Shortly after the turn of the century, Kaiser Permanente embarked on a massive construction campaign that effectively replaced all 13 of its SPC 1 hospitals in the state.

“The main thrust of the program was to create or enhance facilities to embrace new technologies and other advanced features of modern health care,” said Kaiser spokesman David Ebright.

The work includes a major building expansion at Kaiser’s Santa Rosa campus on Bicentennial Way, as well as the construction of a new Santa Clara Medical Center, the replacement of an old hospital tower in Vallejo and other major expansions in Roseville and South Sacramento, Ebright said.

Bhatia, the seismic compliance supervisor for OSHPD, said the state is working to get every hospital in the state out of the SPC 1 category by the final deadline.

“We’re hoping that we’ll slowly decrease to zero by 2020,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.