Developers Disaster-Proof a Hospital

JOPLIN, MO—On May 22, 2011, one of the deadliest tornadoes in US history descended on the Missouri city of Joplin and demolished St. John’s Mercy Regional Medical Center. As reported in GlobeSt.com, McCarthy Building Companies, Inc. was then hired to replace it with the 890,000 square-foot Mercy Hospital Joplin. And next week, about three years after the project began, patients will begin to arrive, but this time they will have a hospital that provides far more protection and is far more likely to remain operational in the event of another weather disaster.

Early on in the project’s design phase, officials from the St. Louis-based McCarthy began poring over the latest standards from FEMA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to see what their options were for hardening the building and then deciding “what made sense from a financial standpoint,” McCarthy project director Ryan Felton tells GlobeSt.com.