This article originally appeared on City Biz.
Hoar Construction announced today the completion of the west bed tower at Shannon Medical Center in San Angelo, Texas. The seven-story, 140,000 square-foot expansion broke ground in early 2023 and will allow the healthcare provider to serve a wider range of patients across Concho Valley. During construction, Hoar utilized advanced technology including robots to demolish existing structures and minimize noise and vibrations from the impact and various prefabrication methods to shorten the project timeline.
Shannon Medical Center spans 1,536,000 square feet on East Harris Avenue in downtown San Angelo, and is part of Shannon Health System, the largest healthcare provider in the Concho Valley region.
The new bed tower brings three floors of a concrete parking garage underneath four floors of patient care space as well as significantly modernizing and expanding healthcare services capabilities. The third floor houses a 19,310 square-foot Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and the fourth floor features patient rooms. The fifth and sixth floors remain shell space to be built out for future use.
“Our team at Hoar is proud to play a part in bringing enhanced, much-needed healthcare space to Shannon Medical Center’s campus, allowing them to serve a larger number of patients in the region with high-level care,” said Garrett Wheat, project manager at Hoar. “As a native of San Angelo, it has been especially rewarding to see how Hoar has remained fervently dedicated to completing the job at the highest quality, with few disruptions to hospital staff or patients. This project was a perfect example of Hoar’s ability to combine our collective years of experience and knowledge and find creative methods, giving our client the best outcome possible.”
Hoar completed high-quality work while minimizing impact to the active hospital campus by employing unique construction and technology solutions. During foundation work, Hoar collaborated with the design team to find workarounds that allowed drilling to continue through unforeseen subgrade stratum conditions.
They also leveraged prefabrication methods to build bathroom pods and headwalls offsite and exterior wall panels onsite. This methodology allowed for work to be completed offsite concurrently to the construction timeline, which also avoided labor challenges sometimes associated with rural markets. The team used a demolition robot to demolish an existing staircase safely, mitigating vibration and keeping the process quieter than traditional saws and hammers would as well as a robot called HP site print for the layout of hangers in the concrete slab. All these methods allowed Hoar to manage the project timeline while keeping quality of work and safety of the hospital staff and construction employees at the highest priorities.
“With major labor shortages continuing to be a challenge for trades, it was crucial that our team recognized the benefit that prefabbing would have on our project schedule and budget, and it helped to further strengthen our level of trust with the Shannon team. I’m impressed with our team’s ability to think quickly and use our combined expertise to choose the options that yield the best possible results for our clients,” said Wheat.
Approximately 8,609 cubic yards of concrete were placed on the project, along with 790 tons of rebar. To place the prefabbed components onto the project site as well as concrete and rebar placement, Hoar brought in a 168 foot-high crane in early January 2023, which was the first tower crane to be used within the San Angelo city limits.
Hoar also completed the east bed tower expansion and renovation project at Shannon Medical Center in February 2020, after more than 20 unique phases of construction. This project spanned seven stories and included an 8,000 square-foot ICU and 26,000 square feet of interior renovations.
Additional project partners on the west bed tower expansion include O’Connell Robertson as the architect and MEP engineer and Datum Engineers as the structural engineer.
Hoar Construction has established itself as one of America’s leading healthcare builders, completing over $1.4 billion in healthcare projects over the past 10 years. Within Texas, Hoar has also served as the general contractor on more than 950,000 square feet of expansion, renovation, and new-build projects for patient beds, ORs, MOBs, CUPs, cath labs and more for multiple, repeat healthcare clients.
