By Healthcare Facilities Today

After an EF5 tornado ripped apart St. John's Regional Medical Center on May 22, 2011, the Joplin, Mo., hospital is making every effort to rebuild with a new hardened facility designed to stand up to devastating wind forces. 

"This is tornado country, so you need to build to prepare for that," John Farnen, executive director of strategic projects for Mercy, the hospital’s parent company, says in an NFPA Journal article.

By examining what and how systems failed at St. Johns, the new facility — Mercy Hospital Joplin, a $500 million hospital scheduled to open in 2015 — takes tornado readiness to the next level.

At St. John's, as the tornado bore down on the 341-bed facility for 45 seconds, nearly all of the windows were shattered, allowing the wind to penetrate deeply into the facility, where it ripped interior finishes off, turned medical equipment into projectiles and sucked patients out of areas of refuge, according to the article. However, it was observed that in the behavioral health area, the safety glass cracked, but remained in place, withstanding 200 mph winds.  The new hospital will have stronger windows throughout and will be rated to withstand winds up to 250 mph in critical patient areas.

Mercy Hospital Joplin's envelope will also be hardened, with only reinforced concrete, stone and brick, or precast concrete cladding patient care areas. The roofs will all be concrete decks with a double roof system and a waterproof membrane. The old hospital's concrete decks survived the tornado, but those roofs with metal decks were extensively damaged, according to the article. 

Another strategy the new hospital is employing is interior safe zones with hallway walls extending to the deck above, and floors, walls and ceilings anchored with extra structural supports.

After the tornado, St. John's had a total loss of power. They had only one utility feed and air handlers ripped off the roof and other debris obliterated the backup generators. There was no backup power on site, even for equipment in critical-care areas. "Electricity is the lifeblood of the hospital, and suddenly losing it, in those circumstances, made things very, very difficult," according to the article.

To address the critical need for redundant power in a hospital, the new facility will have two utility lines feed it from two different substations. The hospital's generators and fuel tanks will be in a partially buried concrete structure and will have 96 hours of fuel on site. And every piece of critical equipment, from the stairwell lights to life-support equipment will have its own uninterruptible power supply.    

Read the full article for more lessons learned.