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The old Civic hospital campus is on life support, kept going by regular infusions of money for near-emergency repairs.
The latest is a multimillion-dollar replacement of its main electrical station, a 50-year-old beast in a basement in one of the oldest buildings of The Ottawa Hospital’s oldest campus, which will eat up most of a $6.16-million grant the Ontario government is giving the hospital for major repairs this year.
That, in turn, is most of the $8.8 million all Ottawa’s hospitals are sharing for this kind of work. It’s all deeply unsexy: new windows, boilers, ventilation, roofs. The government pays for this stuff rather than asking the hospital to fundraise for any of it because good luck securing a big donation for the Smith Family Boiler No. 3. But it’s all as essential as diagnostic machines and surgical suites. No power, no heat, a leaky roof — no treatment.
The Civic uses five to seven megawatts of electricity depending on the season, said Fred Kendall, the hospital’s facilities manager, which is enough to power 5,000 to 7,000 homes. Replacing the main electrical station won’t be finished until as much as two years from now, after a bunch of intense planning to orchestrate it correctly.
“We feel that we can do a phased approach, where we do so much of it at a time,” Kendall said. “We have what’s called a ring system, where we can switch around and feed from one into the other. So there’ll be a power outage for about five minutes as we switch from one to the other and then replace a board. It’s a real shell game.”
The bulk of the physical work will be done around the clock on weekends when the hospital isn’t as busy, Kendall said.
Liberal MPPs Yasir Naqvi and John Fraser promised the money for the project Tuesday in a room containing an electrical substation, a sweltering underground chamber that also contains a sump pit. That substation was replaced with a previous government grant about five years ago.
The main station that’s up next is in such a tight space that the hospital let reporters squeeze in briefly to see it and its vintage circuit breakers before getting us out again quickly. Fraser’s a sturdily built guy and Kendall kept asking him not to brush against things.
“Very often, we think of the doctors, the nurses, the other health-care professionals that are key to delivery of health care in our community, but what we don’t think about and we don’t thank enough are the people who make these operations run. The people who work in electrical … or in our boiler rooms. Maintenance, facilities, janitorial services,” said Naqvi, the MPP for Ottawa Centre. “Look at the working conditions they’re working in, right in the basement in a very, very hot room.”
This big hot steam pipe is outside the electrical substation we’re in. pic.twitter.com/NNDWH3ZEU9
— David Reevely (@davidreevely) July 11, 2017
This was all deep in the backstage part of the hospital, at the end of a long down-sloping passage lined with pipes and tubes labelled with alerts about hot steam and pressure and toxic gases, fuel oil and pneumatic transfer devices.
There’s a line of hooks bolted to the wall that keep garbage carts from rolling away downhill. There are padlocked doors for chemical storage and biohazardous waste. Down the hall is a line of disused beds. Kendall warned us about the stairs, which aren’t up to code and will trip you if you don’t climb them with due care and attention.
You could film a chase scene down there, or a nightmare.
“The reason the Ottawa Hospital decides to do events like these in boiler rooms, electrical rooms like this one, is to make the case for why we need a new hospital building as soon as possible,” said Naqvi, only half joking.
That’s the thing about this money: The Civic is functioning but so many of its systems and facilities are obsolete that we’re going to spend billions of dollars on a brand-new hospital a few blocks east on Carling Avenue. After years of squabbling over just where the new campus will go, the planning is moving along quickly, said Joanne Read, the hospital’s vice-president for planning and support services.
“My team refers to this like a car. You can change the engine in the car so many times, but at one point the body just starts to wear out. We’ve been doing that with this for 50 years,” Read said. She was talking about the electrical system but the same applies to the Civic as a whole.
She’s hoping to open the new hospital’s doors in 10 years, after which the century-old Civic is to be drastically renovated, maybe demolished. This is an expensive short-term fix, but one that’s necessary because choosing a new site took so long.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
This year’s funding for Ottawa hospitals from the $175-million Health Infrastructure Renewal Fund:
查看原文...
The latest is a multimillion-dollar replacement of its main electrical station, a 50-year-old beast in a basement in one of the oldest buildings of The Ottawa Hospital’s oldest campus, which will eat up most of a $6.16-million grant the Ontario government is giving the hospital for major repairs this year.
That, in turn, is most of the $8.8 million all Ottawa’s hospitals are sharing for this kind of work. It’s all deeply unsexy: new windows, boilers, ventilation, roofs. The government pays for this stuff rather than asking the hospital to fundraise for any of it because good luck securing a big donation for the Smith Family Boiler No. 3. But it’s all as essential as diagnostic machines and surgical suites. No power, no heat, a leaky roof — no treatment.
The Civic uses five to seven megawatts of electricity depending on the season, said Fred Kendall, the hospital’s facilities manager, which is enough to power 5,000 to 7,000 homes. Replacing the main electrical station won’t be finished until as much as two years from now, after a bunch of intense planning to orchestrate it correctly.
“We feel that we can do a phased approach, where we do so much of it at a time,” Kendall said. “We have what’s called a ring system, where we can switch around and feed from one into the other. So there’ll be a power outage for about five minutes as we switch from one to the other and then replace a board. It’s a real shell game.”
The bulk of the physical work will be done around the clock on weekends when the hospital isn’t as busy, Kendall said.
Liberal MPPs Yasir Naqvi and John Fraser promised the money for the project Tuesday in a room containing an electrical substation, a sweltering underground chamber that also contains a sump pit. That substation was replaced with a previous government grant about five years ago.
The main station that’s up next is in such a tight space that the hospital let reporters squeeze in briefly to see it and its vintage circuit breakers before getting us out again quickly. Fraser’s a sturdily built guy and Kendall kept asking him not to brush against things.
“Very often, we think of the doctors, the nurses, the other health-care professionals that are key to delivery of health care in our community, but what we don’t think about and we don’t thank enough are the people who make these operations run. The people who work in electrical … or in our boiler rooms. Maintenance, facilities, janitorial services,” said Naqvi, the MPP for Ottawa Centre. “Look at the working conditions they’re working in, right in the basement in a very, very hot room.”
This big hot steam pipe is outside the electrical substation we’re in. pic.twitter.com/NNDWH3ZEU9
— David Reevely (@davidreevely) July 11, 2017
This was all deep in the backstage part of the hospital, at the end of a long down-sloping passage lined with pipes and tubes labelled with alerts about hot steam and pressure and toxic gases, fuel oil and pneumatic transfer devices.
There’s a line of hooks bolted to the wall that keep garbage carts from rolling away downhill. There are padlocked doors for chemical storage and biohazardous waste. Down the hall is a line of disused beds. Kendall warned us about the stairs, which aren’t up to code and will trip you if you don’t climb them with due care and attention.
You could film a chase scene down there, or a nightmare.
“The reason the Ottawa Hospital decides to do events like these in boiler rooms, electrical rooms like this one, is to make the case for why we need a new hospital building as soon as possible,” said Naqvi, only half joking.
That’s the thing about this money: The Civic is functioning but so many of its systems and facilities are obsolete that we’re going to spend billions of dollars on a brand-new hospital a few blocks east on Carling Avenue. After years of squabbling over just where the new campus will go, the planning is moving along quickly, said Joanne Read, the hospital’s vice-president for planning and support services.
“My team refers to this like a car. You can change the engine in the car so many times, but at one point the body just starts to wear out. We’ve been doing that with this for 50 years,” Read said. She was talking about the electrical system but the same applies to the Civic as a whole.
She’s hoping to open the new hospital’s doors in 10 years, after which the century-old Civic is to be drastically renovated, maybe demolished. This is an expensive short-term fix, but one that’s necessary because choosing a new site took so long.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
This year’s funding for Ottawa hospitals from the $175-million Health Infrastructure Renewal Fund:
- Bruyère Continuing Care: $552,000
- Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario: $1.17 million
- Montfort Hospital: $430,000
- Queensway-Carleton Hospital: $426,000
- The Ottawa Hospital: $6.16 million
- University of Ottawa Heart Institute: $123,000
查看原文...
