LEED-Gold for Central Plant at UC San Diego Jacobs Medical Center

Article written prior to gaining LEED Gold certification — yes, LEED Gold for a medical center central plant.

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Sustainability highlighted throughout central utility plant at UC San Diego

With Governor Jerry Brown’s recent water restriction mandate and anticipated rations from water utilities, healthcare facilities are under pressure to address conservation. Fortunately for the rising UC San Diego Jacobs Medical Center, the environmentally conscious features of its new Central Utility Plant (CUP) are already addressing this urgency, reusing and recycling condensate a full seven months prior to the opening of the Jacobs Medical Center.

Already seamlessly handling all utilities at the expanding campus, the CUP is surprisingly not an unsightly concrete box, but rather, a carefully designed, curvilinear, eco-conscious facility with sweeping curves, floor-to-ceiling glass and eco colors simultaneously blending with the environment.

The design-assist team of Kitchell and CannonDesign completed the CUP last summer, and the facility began recycling and reusing condensate at the beginning of March – long before the bed tower opening in 2016. Traditionally, condensate is drained during construction and not recovered until closer to the end of the project when steam loads are greater.

The steam condensation return system designed for the CUP goes back to an active condensate return storage and pumping system for redeployment to other energy consumption activities. The new plant steam generation system feeds multiple buildings (new and existing), coming online at different times. The condensate return system and the associated piping system were designed to operate at full steam load when all buildings are online and returning condensate.

The amount of condensate being returned from an initial phase (existing hospital) and partial load was not originally planned to be treated and reused. The project team recognized that by adding valves, introducing ongoing chemical treatment and adding oxygen scavengers at key locations in the condensate return system, a plan could be implemented to return condensate during all phases of the steam startup through functional testing of the new equipment (final phase), resulting in a savings of up to 4 million gallons of softened water

Strategically Green

From an energy standpoint, the building is well-insulated with a strategically-designed window pattern on the façade of the south side to capture heat and to provide maximum daylight. The north side, which has no heat gain, has an entirely glazed façade and since it faces the campus, was designed to echo the design standards of the rest of UCSD buildings.

The ballast rock and metal battens on the roof were designed and installed in a manner that allow the building to blend with the canyon when viewed from the patient rooms and balconies of the medical center buildings to the north. Every system in the CUP was designed to mitigate noise leaching into the surrounding environment. For example, the cooling towers sit in a basin adjacent to protected wetlands, and are surrounded by concrete walls with acoustical panels to reduce sound impact to the environment.

The team’s goal was to not exceed 75 decibels, and they more than achieved their quest with a maximum of 68 decibels. The team also utilized ultra-low noise fans on the cooling towers.

The coordinated effort to bring the project to fruition earlier than scheduled was a result of the commitment of the UC San Diego Jacobs Medical Center facility staff, general contractor Kitchell, Control Air, EXP Engineers and Cannon Design,. The two-story, 40,000-square-foot building services the current hospital and the $750 million medical center expansion (currently underway). It also has capacity to accommodate one million square feet of future expansion.

The CUP features:

  • Three-1,300 ton chillers, which generate enough chilled water to fill 10 Olympic-size swimming pools each day
  • Three 3,900-gallon per minute cooling towers
  • Three 21,000 lb./hr. steam boilers capable of creating steam to heat 1,000 homes daily
  • Four 2.5-megawatt emergency generators, which could generate enough electricity to power 10,000 homes
  • Two 30,000-gallon underground fuel tanks
  • 3,000-square-foot underground utility tunnel for mechanical utility routing

The CUP sits nestled in a canyon which abuts the medical center campus. The designers’ main goal for was to blend into the canyon while providing visual appeal, since it is visible from many areas of the campus, including patient rooms, waiting areas and administrative areas, and graduate student housing. It also flanks a main medical campus road that will soon extend over the I-5 freeway to join the medical and academic campuses.

Extending Green Goals

The top priority was to not only minimize impact to the surrounding environment, but also to enhance it. After several different design iterations, the design-assist team came up with a tiered building that follows the natural contours of the edge of the canyon.

“From an architectural and engineering standpoint, there is nothing like this. Usually CUPs are add-ons to a building’s central design,” said Cannon Design Associate Vice President Christof Madeiski. “We approached the design of the CUP so it would be as pleasing as the architectural marvel it sits beside. When you look down from the south side of the medical center, you will have views of the CUP, the ocean and the canyon. It all needs to blend together.”

Even the colorization of the building was carefully considered. Metal panels, coated with special “Ultra Cool” paint appear to change hues of green as you walk by. Gravel on the roof is canyon-colored earth tones to blend with the Joshua trees and scrub, for example, indigenous to the area. The visual appeal of the roof was given significant attention because a significant proportion of those who will see the building will view it from above.

The new CUP for Jacobs Medical Center epitomizes form meeting function at its very best. It is already a point of great pride for the entire design-assist team and is destined to become a standard-bearer for future CUPs.

Muzzling noise never more critical than when building above babies

Originally Seen in the Pages of Arizona Real Estate Magazine…

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Noise, vibrations, dust and other disruptions are always a concern during hospital construction but never more (potentially) problematic than when the youngest, most vulnerable patients are a mere 5.5 inches away on the floor below. This is what’s happening right now at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, as shell space is built-out above the hospital’s Pediatric Epilepsy Monitoring Unit (PEMU), a joint program with Barrow Neurological Institute. In a PEMU, each patient’s room is outfitted with video equipment to capture seizure activity while a child’s brainwaves are recorded. The feedback is used to obtain highly accurate diagnoses and treatment plans.

Anticipating future need was strategically built into the design of Phoenix Children’s Hospital’s 11-story patient tower, which opened to patients in 2011. Just a year after opening, plans were set in motion to populate the top floors, and today we’re creating extra capacity on the tower’s ninth floor. The 45,000-square-foot space will feature 48 patient rooms. Kitchell is back on site as the general contractor, HKS is the architect and CCRD Partners is the M/E/P Engineer.

Don’t drop anything!

Just imagine how quietly the construction team must proceed to avoid making even the smallest sound or vibration. Noise mitigation is priority number one. It’s a construction site where communication is done via whispers, texts and email, and all field supervisors have radios in case an immediate shutdown of construction activities is necessary. And it’s a site where materials are brought into the building via an external hoist.

Everything the team does requires advance thought, meticulous planning and ongoing communication with hospital staff, which began during preconstruction and included deputizing one of the nurses “construction project manager.” Nothing could be a surprise. Even something as seemingly mundane as lifting a pipe could be an issue, because of the potential of the loud “clang” as the result of dropping it. This advance thought included orchestrating a “make noise” session for staff a month prior to construction. Together with our trade contractors, we demonstrated all noises that could be a potential impact to the eighth floor. This included floor grinding, shot pins, scissor lifts, roto-hammers, cutting, chopping, dropped pipe, saw cutting, shop vac and core drilling.

How to eliminate nose

Here are some of the tactics being deployed to ensure the comfort of the children and their families below the jobsite, while allowing staff to do their work unimpeded:

  • A lift was built on the west side of the building to transport everything up and in for construction. Absolutely nothing is brought in through the inside of the building. The lift makes 100 trips daily. Because children love watching construction activities, we decorated the hoist with a decal of Superman so he appears to be flying each time the hoist passes in front of their windows.
  • As much work as possible was done offsite, completely removing significant noise and vibration from the job site. For example, headwalls were built offsite and then ingeniously “split in two” to fit inside the outdoor lift and reassembled once on site.
  • Ingenious phasing has been instituted. For example, the loudest activity is drilling into the floor (the ceiling of the 8th floor) which creates echoes and vibrations. Working with hospital staff, we developed a schedule to drill 30 minutes on and 30 minutes off.
  • Infection Control Risk Assessment (ICRA) containment on the 8th floor was meticulously planned and executed long before construction began. We used cardboard mock-ups to create the center core of the floor (nurse work areas) and then adjusted areas to fit the changing needs of the facility. These adjustments required plumbing revisions to approximately 30 rooms on the floor below.
  • Rubber mats were place throughout the 45,000-square-foot space to deaden the sound of the carts which traverse the expanse constantly throughout the day. And all cutting and chopping activities are required to be executed on a rubber mat.
  • We’re upgrading the existing shell space fire sprinkler system for the 9th floor build-out, which requires being “wet” every night to keep the system energized. To mitigate the risk of an overnight leak, and potentially putting the 8th floor at risk, we place sensors on the floor at the end of each shift. In the event of a leak, these sensors signal team leaders’ cell phones on a SmartThings app. This allows for response time to be minutes instead of hours.

The schedule of direct impact activities, such as drilling, cutting, and materials transport, are communicated proactively and requested adjustments are always accommodated. Our project manager meets with the nursing staff on the 8th floor each morning at 7:15 a.m. to ensure that the flow of construction above is acceptable based on potential changes during the preceding night. Additionally, Kitchell meets with the nursing staff weekly (enhanced by homemade cupcakes) to discuss upcoming activities. When concern for patients and families, communication with staff and thorough forethought are embedded into every plan and every activity, construction doesn’t need to create commotion and disruption, even in a children’s hospital. Meticulous planning and ongoing collaboration with medical staff makes the process seamless and rewarding for all. And cupcakes don’t hurt either!

Dave Cottle is Phoenix Children’s Hospital Vice President of Planning, Design and Construction.

Aron Kirch is a Kitchell project manager.