CEO Update: A visit to the construction site

Justin Shorter is the superintendent of our hospital expansion project. He works for JE Dunn Construction and has been a great partner. We recently walked through the construction site for an update on the progress.

Continue reading this blog to learn more about the construction. Watch the video for exclusive footage from the construction site, both indoors and outdoors.

Hauling in 24,000 yards of dirt

Michael Calhoun, CEO/Executive Director: Give me an update on where we’re at with the project and some of the details about the construction.

Justin Shorter, JE Dunn: We’ve been fighting the weather a lot lately, but we’re making progress. Right now, we’re trying to get the earthwork completed. There’s a lot of dirt we had to import in here to get the site up to grade. We’ve been working on utilities for the last few months. We had to move all the utilities going into the hospital, which was a big part of this job.

Calhoun: It seems like all the utility switchovers went smoothly. Tell me about the experience we’ve had with that.

Shorter: All the existing utilities were in the footprint of the tower, so they all had to be moved systematically. That was a lot of planning with CMH, the design team and our trade partners. It was a tough job, and we pulled off four different utility relocations and shutdowns and switchovers successfully, some overnight. That’s a huge part of the job to get to this point where we can move forward.

Calhoun: Reports I received from the hospital were just how pleased everyone was that no care was disrupted. Things went more quickly than we had first planned. So, really, kudos to you and your team for that.

Tell me about how much dirt we had to bring in here. It seems like every day we’ve been seeing dump truck after dump truck coming through here.

Shorter: About 24,000 yards total to bring in to level out the site at 10 yards at a time per dump truck. It’s an enormous amount of dirt, but we’re getting closer.

And those 5-foot pipes

Calhoun: We have huge pipes underneath here, flowing out toward the back of the hospital. Tell me about those. We’re trying to get drainage off of the site. Tell me about how we’re going to plan for that whenever we have a lot of water.

Shorter: What we’ve installed is a 5-foot diameter pipe, which is a huge storm sewer pipe on the southeast corner that heads out to the detention pond area. We’ve got to increase the size of the detention pond just to allow for all the new surface lots that are going here. Soon, we’ll actually start running the continuation of that storm pipe up across the site. So we’ll start being able to manage the water and get it off-site efficiently so we can keep working.

168 foundation piers

Calhoun: I’m really interested in this drill rig. I want to hear about the drilling we’re doing and the piers we’re building.

Shorter: That’s the pier drilling rig, about a 180,000-pound machine. We’ve got 168 piers on the job. It’s just a big hole going all the way to bedrock, roughly about 20 feet. We hit bedrock, and we have to drill a foot into that rock. That’s what’s holding up the hospital. It’s kind of a long process. We put these rebar cages in, fill them full of concrete and build the hospital on top of that.

Calhoun: That’s what the foundation sits on?

Shorter: Yes.

Calhoun: About how far in between each pier do we go?

Shorter: Twenty to 30 feet. In the tower, there’s one under every column that goes up throughout the structure. So that transfers the load into the ground. We hope to be done toward the end of August with drilling all the piers.

Up next: Basement walls, piers and concrete slabs

Calhoun: So now we’re drilling the piers. We’re doing the dirt work. We’re bringing it up to grade. What are the next steps after that?

Shorter: Right now, we’re getting the basement walls poured. That will allow us to get backfilled around that area to where we can get ready for slab on grade. Before the slabs, the crew that’s putting the foundation walls in will move up here where we’re drilling the piers. That’ll be the west stair tower.

That tower’s concrete. We’ll go up all three floors. Then we’ll move that operation to the center elevator shaft, take it all the way up and then the east shaft and then the slab on grade will follow that. We’re looking at starting to pour our first slab in the first part of September. We hope to have all the slabs poured out by the middle of October. We should start our first elevated deck in the first part of October.

Moving inside

We also looked inside the renovation space to see the infrastructure work that is taking place there now.

Calhoun: Tell me about what we’re doing inside with all this digging.

Shorter: We’ve got the main sewer line exposed here. We’re running an entirely new pipe from the endpoint all the way out to the south end of the job site. Then, we have to switch over all the existing piping to the new pipe. That’ll feed all the tower at that point.

Calhoun: We’re currently in phase one of this project. Phase one gets done at the end of ’25, first of ’26. At that time, we’ll have the full three-story structure finished, right?

Shorter: Yeah. We’ll have the central utility plant and all the new equipment up and running. The tower will open. You all move. Then that’ll vacate and make room for the remodel area after that.

Calhoun: It looks like the remodel project will be about, what, six to eight months?

Shorter: Yeah, depending on how we can phase it and work with you all to get to the areas. That’ll be another tough part of the project.

Calhoun: By the end of ’26, we should be wrapping this project up.

Michael Calhoun shares the latest happenings at CMH in his monthly CEO Updates. He is the CEO/executive director of CMH and the Citizens Memorial Health Care Foundation.