New children's hospital inspires, challenges builders

Building a place where sick and injured children will be cared for touches the hearts of the men and women working on the MUSC Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital and Pearl Tourville Women's Pavilion.

Construction superintendent Jacob Shinta said it’s instinctive. “Just as a human, with morals, you have that extra incentive to ensure what you’re building has a higher purpose.”

He has friends whose children have been treated in the current MUSC Children’s Hospital, which the new hospital will replace. “My best friend’s child had a heart transplant here and still to this day comes on a regular basis.”

So making sure the new hospital is built to the highest standards is a priority for him and the dozens of other men and women preparing the site at the corner of Calhoun Street and Courtenay Drive. Groundbreaking is being held today.

But building in an urban area on the coast is no easy task.

Shinta, who’s in charge of demolition and exterior skin – the outside of the new building – is with the construction company Robins and Morton, a key player in the project. “The downtown setting creates a lot of issues,” he said. “We had to take out the old building on the site bit by bit to protect our workers and people walking and driving by.”

The old building was Charleston Memorial Hospital, which closed about seven years ago.

The site is also challenging because of Charleston’s tendency to flood. Joe Edmonds, a senior site superintendent with Cumming Construction Management, which is also working on the new hospital, is overseeing that part of the work. 

“The streets flood every time it rains, so obviously there’s very wet soil,” Edmonds said. “On the peninsula and Charleston area, dewatering is a very important part. The further you get from the coast the less prevalent it is.”

Dewatering means draining water from the site with a pump. “You have to try to control the water from infiltrating the job site. You have a dewatering system that goes around the perimeter of the work area and you do localized dewatering in the areas where you work.”

And water isn’t the only challenge Mother Nature had in store for the people planning and preparing to build the hospital. Steve Wiley, a senior project manager with Robins and Morton, said Charleston is in one of the higher hazard areas in the nation when it comes to earthquakes and dangerous storms.

“The new hospital is being designed to meet current hurricane and seismic codes,” Wiley said. “Changes to the building code since the building of the Ashley River Tower will make the children’s hospital one of the most advanced facilities in the region in regards to meeting the seismic and hurricane requirements,” Wiley said.

Another consideration in building the new hospital doesn’t involve nature – it has to do with the site’s history. Hundreds of old piles that supported other buildings that used to stand there have to be removed, and 1,300 new ones will be installed. Wiley said that will take several months. “We have vibration and sound monitoring in place to make sure that operations at the nearby facilities will not be impacted.”

The team is also making a point of recycling as much as possible. In fact, more than 90 percent of what’s being removed from the site is being recycled. That includes about 2,200 tons of concrete, 360 tons of metal, 78 tons of wood and 40 tons of brick.

Most importantly for this part of the process, Wiley said the men and women who have been hard at work have stayed safe. “We successfully completed a highly risky demo job without a loss time injury. This equates to 264 days without a lost time injury.”