Everett, Wash.
Published: Monday, April 21, 2008

High hopes for Colby hospital expansion

Construction is a nuisance for neighbors, and it won't be over anytime soon.

By Sharon Salyer
Herald Writer

 EVERETT -- At 175 feet tall, Providence Everett Medical Center's new hospital tower will be one of the most dominating buildings in Everett's skyline.

Its cost -- $600 million -- is the equivalent of buying about four Boeing 787 Dreamliners.

When it opens in 2011, it will have an emergency room nearly as long as football field, with space to treat as many as 79 patients at a time.

And now, with final designs of the building complete, the public is getting its first glimpse of what the 12-story building at the Colby campus will look like.

"This, to me, is state of the art," said Dave Brooks, the hospital's chief executive.

The 680,000-square-foot structure will be shaped like a "U." The building won't have a courtyard, although the middle of the hospital won't rise higher than the fifth floor. In half of its 368 rooms, patients will have views of Puget Sound or the Cascades; the other rooms will face inward, with a view of a fifth-floor rooftop garden.

During a recent employee meeting, Brooks described some of the building's patient-friendly features.

Its main entryway off 13th Street in north Everett will have a large concourse-style overhang to protect people from the weather.

Its lobby will have a far larger space than the hospital's current cramped space for people being admitted or waiting for a ride home after being discharged.

The surgery waiting area will have a play area for children, a quiet room, access to computers for patients, and consultation rooms so medical staff and family members can meet in private to get updates on the condition of family members.

Most of the hospital's 368 patient rooms will be private, and, at about 300 square feet, spacious. There will be pullout couches for family members.

When patients undergo heart or brain surgeries, "people fly in from all over the country to be with their family member," Brooks said. "Health care is realizing we've got to have more room at the bedside for the family to be right there."

The hospital's new 13th Street parking garage opens in July. The current parking structure will be demolished in August and "a very big, deep hole," will be dug in the fall for the building's foundation, Brooks said.

"Wait till you see that steel go up and you see the size of this thing," he said.

The "size of this thing," is exactly what bothers some nearby neighbors, who say it's not easy living in a construction zone.

"As far as the attitude from the neighborhood -- not happy," said Garrik Hudson-Falcon, who headed the Northwest Neighborhood Association for two years and lives on Lombard Avenue.

Construction was under way on the hospital's new parking garage until 9:30 p.m. one recent week night, he said. The lights used to illuminate the work area "light up my whole yard, a block and a half away," he said.

"Every weekend … you'll hear them pounding away at 8 a.m. The weekend's here. Sleep in? Forget that," he said, adding that construction on the medical tower will continue until 2011.

Nancy Hecht, who lives in the 1300 block of Lombard Ave., said dust and dirt from the construction seeps into her house. "My house has never been so dirty inside," she said.

"Starting at 7:30 on the nose every morning, they have metal banging and the beep, beep, beep of the trucks backing up," she said. "It's a constant noise."

While neighbors don't dispute the need for the hospital to expand its services, some have fought the project for years, nearly from the moment it was first announced.

Some neighbors still feel the expansion should not have occurred in a residential area, Hecht said.

Hecht said she saw the design plans for the building at a recent neighborhood meeting. "For a hospital, I think it's very nice," she said. "I would think it was very nice if it was sitting someplace else, too."

Hospital officials don't disagree that the construction has an impact.

"It is a big project and big projects create some disruptions," said Scott Anderson, assistant administrator of facilities and construction. The hospital wants to hear what it can do to make the situation better for everybody, he said.

The hospital tries to limit weekend work. "We know it's disruptive," Anderson said. The hospital has another reason to limit weekend work, he said. It has to pay higher wages on weekends.

Some neighbors say their concerns won't end when the building is finished, noting that the 12-story structure will cast long shadows, the longest of which will occur on the summer and winter solstice.

At 8 p.m. on June 21, normally the longest day of the year, the building's shadow is expected to extend about three blocks to the southeast across Broadway at about 13th Street, according to architects.

At 9 a.m. on Dec. 21, normally the shortest day of the year, it is expected to stretch to the northwest to about 11th Street and Rucker.

"It's like this giant sundial or Stonehenge," Hudson-Falcon said.

It's true that the medical tower will cast a shadow and block neighborhood views, Anderson said. All the hospital can do is make the building as visually pleasing as possible, he said.

Providence had to launch the building project to keep up with patient demand, Brooks said.

Its emergency room treated 103,000 patients last year, making it the busiest in the state. Current facilities were not built for that volume, he said.

The hospital needed a new building and more space to be able to treat the increasing number of patients expected to seek treatment there over the next decade as the county grows and its population ages, Brooks said.

The hospital needs to update its facilities, he said, so residents of Snohomish County "don't have to leave their own community for the level of care that they expect."



Herald reporter Sharon Salyer at 425-339-3486 or salyer@heraldnet.com.
© 2009The Daily Herald Co., Everett, WA