Loma Linda University Health officially broke ground on the hospital complex that will house the new adult hospital and expanded Children’s Hospital in Loma Linda, California. Over 3,000 people looked on as the shovels hit the dirt at the community groundbreaking event Sunday, May 22.
The new hospital complex will be named after Dennis and Carol Troesh who donated $100 million toward the philanthropic campaign benefiting the new hospital, Vision 2020: The Campaign for a WHOLE tomorrow.
The new hospital complex, which will open its doors to the community in 2020, has been designed by architecture firm NBBJ to embrace a healing environment, from wellness gardens that support physical, social and spiritual health, to patient rooms that promote patient and family healing, nursing stations that encourage collaboration and community spaces filled with natural light. McCarthy Building Companies is serving as general contractor.
The hospital will not only be the tallest building in San Bernardino County, but it will also be considered one of the safest in the state. The project is implementing a first-of-its-kind vertical earthquake isolation system which separates the building from the ground using more than 500 vertical shock absorbers—a large-scale version of a modern car suspension system. Working hand-in-hand with a lateral earthquake isolation system of sliding bearings and dampers, the system will protect patients and staff from injury while keeping the hospital operational following a potentially catastrophic magnitude 7.9 earthquake on the nearby San Jacinto Fault.
The Campus Transformation Project will be the first major building in the world to implement this state-of-the-art 3-D earthquake protection technology.
