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New Children's Memorial Hospital is no "kids' stuff" to piping contractor
By Don Doherty
Museumlike diversions — such as a real fire truck (donated to the hospital) and an interactive light wall in the 5,000 square-foot sky garden — will create a relaxed, less institutional setting. It will also house brand new technology: a PET/CT scanner, a monitoring and evaluating tool for neurosurgery and chemotherapy, and intra-operative MRI. More than two-dozen new surgery and special procedure rooms will be equipped for minimally invasive surgery.
From the outside, the building appears structurally complete, with roof and exterior surfaces in place. Inside, however, it was still very much a work in progress, especially inside the two floors reserved for mechanical equipment. A spring 2010 visit gave JobScope a look inside both rooms. In the lower mechanical room, on the 10th floor, the ceiling is 43 feet above the floor. Every inch of the exceptionally tall space is necessary to hold the magnitude of ductwork and piping installed here. Multiple layers elbow each other in a complicated configuration that would confound anyone in the position of having to coordinate the task of getting it up there. Follow the horizontal path of the large diameter pipe lines here and the eye sees normal size hangers attached logically to overhead structural beams, extra long hangers in other spots that disappear through small spaces between ducts — even hangers that pass right through ducts that are too wide to be dodged. Passing hanger rods through large ducts is an alteration Jason Winter, F.E. Moran's project manager on the job, has never seen before. "And I might never again," he added. It was accomplished by adding a piece of vertical conduit sealed at both ends so that it won't interfere with the airflow through the duct. The operation was not done in the fab shop but entirely in the field.
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| Above: The crew guides the boiler to a temporary resting
place on the rooftop.
Below: (Left) F.E. Moran's project manager, Jason Winter,
and assistant project manager, Pete Weber, pause
near a window on the 23rd floor mechanical room,
overlooking Lake Michigan..
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 How was the installation planned and orchestrated? For one thing, the same mechanical contractor that is handling the sheet metal is also installing much of the major piping in the new hospital. F.E. Moran Inc., a large mechanical contractor located in Northbrook, Ill., northwest of Chicago, is responsible for the shell and core portion of the piping. (Another contractor, Hill Mechanical Group, is installing the horizontal piping at the new hospital under a separate contract.)
Inside the 10th floor mechanical room alone, there are some 500,000 pounds of ductwork. "The top layer of the room is almost entirely ductwork," Jason Winter said. It will connect with 30 air handlers that will be on the floor. While it looked like much of the ductwork was in place, some 50 sheet metal workers were still at it on day and night shifts. In their wake, 31 pipe fitters step in to do their thing as each section of ductwork is completed. Beside the stacks of prefabricated ducts and pipe, the floor is covered with pipe carts, gang boxes and and assorted lifting equipment, including a large Hercules overhead crane for the heavy lifting. There is a single opening in 10th floor wall to receive pieces lifted by one of the job site's two tower cranes. Once the pipe spools pass through it, they roll on carts to their location. "The goal is to get everything up before the [large, doublestacked] air handling units get in," Winter said. "That's the race we are now in."
 Inside of the upper mechanical room, on the 23rd floor, the large, layered ducts are noticeably absent, leaving plenty of space for the long spans of 36-inch diameter header pipe hung from the ceiling's structural I-beams. They will service the huge pumps on the condenser-water-side of the room here. Winter said that the headers were insta lled months earlier, before the roof deck went in. The structural steel was in place and the tower crane was accessible. It was an unseen opportunity, he said, and the crew took advantage of it. The same tower crane used to raise the sections of the 36-inch steel pipe all the way up the building was able to lower them through the open roof, simplifying the job for installers. "It was slick,"Winter recalled, "and it went very well."
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