In many ways, the modernizations and seismic improvements Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital has been undergoing are a story of long time spans.
The Cottage Hospital Modernization and Seismic Compliance Project was approved by the City Council 11 years ago.
The 1994 Northridge earthquake, the last Southern California earthquake of the magnitude the modernizations aim to inoculate the hospital against, was 22 years ago.
The hospital’s landmark Moreton Bay fig tree that recently received protective shoring to bolster it during the construction project was planted 97 years ago.
In the hospital’s annual update to the city Planning Commission earlier this month, Ron Biscaro, vice president of project management at Cottage Health, laid out how the work was going.
The modernizations entered Phase 6 last September, he said, and are expected to continue for two more years at the complex at 400 W. Pueblo St.
Phase 8, the next and final phase, which deals with internal modeling, is to finish up in 2019, according to Cottage Health’s facilities master schedule.
The $700 million project addresses California laws that require all acute-care hospitals to be retrofitted or rebuilt to withstand — and still be functional following — an earthquake like the magnitude-6.7 Northridge quake that devastated a large swath of Los Angeles. That earthquake killed 57 people, injured 8,000 and caused an estimated $40 billion in property damage, making it one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.
Goleta Valley Cottage Hospital completed its own retrofitting and rebuilding project last year.
The end result of the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital project will be 712,550 square feet of hospital facility.
The ongoing work has proceeded very quietly and has required little interaction between Cottage Health and municipal planning staff over the past year, Tony Boughman, an assistant planner with the city, told Noozhawk.
“Given the scope of the project, construction activities have been achieved in a timely manner and proceeded well,” city planning staff concluded in its report on the project’s progress.
Planning Commissioner Deborah Schwartz commended the project for the proportion of construction-related materials that have been recycled; in 2015, 96.9 percent of all solid waste was diverted from the Tajiguas Landfill, Cottage Health reported.
In addition to the protective shoring for the Moreton Bay fig tree, new planters were installed and landscaping was added around the emergency room parking lot along West Junipero Street in 2015.
The West, Central and Reeves wings of the hospital were also demolished.
Phase 6 consists of building a nursing pavilion and a diagnostic and treatment pavilion.
More than 3 million pounds of structural steel, fabricated in Flagstaff, Ariz., are going into Phase 6, according to Maria Zate, Cottage Health’s manager of public relations.
Erecting all the steel framing and completing the roof framing, Zate told Noozhawk, will be done in two phases over about 12 weeks.
Putting all that steel and framing together, she said, will take more than 30 onsite ironworkers and welders at its peak, along with a 12-member fabrication crew in Flagstaff.
“SBCH Phase 6 is on schedule for a June 2018 completion,” Biscaro said in a statement. “The start of steel erection by McCarthy, the general contractor and its subcontractor, Schuff Steel, has been well coordinated and is projected to be complete within the expected time frame for the project by the first week of August 2016.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Sam Goldman can be reached at sgoldman@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.