McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. (http://www.mccarthy.com/), one of the nation’s premier healthcare builders, has begun construction of the new 74,000-square-foot Heart and Vascular Center at Grossmont Hospital, located at 5555 Grossmont Center Drive in La Mesa, Calif.
McCarthy was retained by the Grossmont Healthcare District (GHD), with CEO Barry Jantz and the publicly elected GHD board members providing oversight. Sharp HealthCare is the operator of Grossmont Hospital through a 30-year lease that was executed with the District in 1991.
Proposition G, a $247 million bond measure approved by voters of the East County region in June 2006, is funding the project, budgeted at $26,325,383 in construction costs. As proposed in the hospital’s Facilities Master Site Plan, Prop. G is funding several other infrastructure construction improvements at the publicly owned hospital, which opened in 1955.
Designed by KMD Architects, the Grossmont Hospital Heart and Vascular Center will be a cast-in-place, concrete structure with spread footings and a structural steel moment frame, with one level below ground and two levels above. Construction of this facility will allow for expansion of the hospital’s existing surgery department and provide new multipurpose procedural rooms with the flexibility to support a wide range of specialties including general surgery, minimally invasive surgery, image-guided surgery and endovascular interventional procedures.
When completed in March of 2015, the building also will house a pharmacy, laboratory and covered walkway connection to the existing Women’s Center on Level A, as well as a new loading dock and materials management services area on Level B. The new building will allow for the relocation of the hospital’s pharmacy and clinical laboratory space to meet current seismic criteria.
“The new facility is being built on a tight site within a small footprint of the busy hospital campus, presenting access challenges for work crews, material and equipment,” said McCarthy Project Director Jason Mrozek. “We’ll also be creating tie-ins to the existing hospital, which will call for a carefully coordinated and closely managed construction schedule to minimize any disruption to campus operations.”
All told, this project encompasses shoring, foundations, structure and build-out of Levels A and B. Level 1 will be provided as a shell space to accommodate the future build-out of a catheterization lab and operating rooms.
KPFF Consulting Engineers is the structural and civil engineer, Randall Lamb is the electrical and mechanical engineer and Wimmer Yamada and Caughey is the landscape architect. Parsons Corporation is serving as GHD’s program manager.
McCarthy is also in the process of building the new $46 million Central Energy Plant at Grossmont Hospital, construction costs for which are also being financed by Prop. G. The three-story, 18,400-square-foot energy plant will include electrical switchgear, emergency generators, cooling towers, chillers, fuel tanks, medical gas tanks and various mechanical equipment that will help meet future capacity needs of the hospital. The plant also will include a control and locker room for facilities management personnel.
The new energy plant additionally will contain a new state-of-the-art cogeneration combustion turbine generator. The cogeneration equipment is not part of the bond-related construction but will complement the efficiencies of the Central Energy Plant and help save millions of dollars in energy costs while reducing the hospital’s emission of greenhouse gas pollutants by 90 percent.
Construction of the Central Energy Plant began last September, and is scheduled for completion in March of 2015. In late April of this year, approximately120 concrete trucks delivered the more than 1,120 cubic yards of concrete needed to construct the foundation for the plant.
About McCarthy Building Companies:
Recognized as one of the nation’s few true builders, McCarthy Building Companies, Inc., is the country’s 8th largest domestic general contractor (Engineering News-Record, May 2012) and the largest general contractor in California. The company is committed to the construction of high performance green buildings; progressive job site technology; and safer, faster and more cost-effective execution. In addition to San Diego, McCarthy has offices in Newport Beach, Sacramento and San Francisco, Calif.; Phoenix; Las Vegas; St. Louis; Dallas; Houston; Atlanta; Albuquerque; and Collinsville, Ill. McCarthy is 100 percent employee-owned. More information about the company is available online at www.mccarthy.com.