St. Luke’s unveils Boise Medical Center facilities

St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center invited the Idaho Business Review on a tour of its three just-completed buildings: a shipping and receiving building, physical plant and parking garage, on the northwest edge of the  campus.

The underground of St. Luke’s

The three buildings are new construction visible from the street. Underneath all those structures — and the city streets between them — St. Luke’s has built an underground corridor almost 1,000 feet long.

With painted lane lines and a turnabout for drivable supply carts and forklifts, this corridor is more like a road. One end is in the basement of the shipping and receiving building, with the other in the basement of the hospital complex.

Material delivered at the loading docks will descend on freight elevators into the basement where it will be loaded on supply carts. The carts will deliver it to the freight elevators the other end of the corridor in the basement of the medical center. The straight-line distance traveled is a block and a half but the corridor doesn’t follow a straight path because it swings under the new physical plant first.

The corridor will make it possible to move the medical center’s supplies on their last trip in the delivery chain without having to dodge pedestrians, vehicles or adverse weather. However, linens and trash will not be making the trip on foot or in carts. St. Luke’s has installed a vacuum-pneumatic system to move bagged linens and refuse. The computerized-security locks on the doors into the pneumatic chutes can be opened only with an authorized staff ID.

Shipping and Receiving

Designed to be the main drop-off and pickup point for the Boise campus, St. Luke’s reworked its original design based on feedback from the surrounding community. To be a better neighbor, St. Luke’s flipped the orientation of the building to place loading docks in the alley instead of facing 2nd St. This creates a more attractive public streetscape as well as cutting down noise.

The building is between 1st and 2nd streets, and Jefferson and Bannock streets. Excavation started in May 2019. St. Luke’s anticipates the building will be up and running in April 2021.

“All three buildings are complete,” said Sandee Gehrke, St. Luke’s vice president of system operations on March 3. “We are waiting on building inspections and permits. I anticipate that we will have all those finished in three to four weeks.”

The 32,091-square-foot facility has four truck bays, double what St. Luke’s had before. The building also includes the medical center’s mail room and its four generators. “The generators can produce eight megawatts,” Gehrke related. “They are for both normal and emergency use.” That’s enough power to light up two towns the size of  Emmett.

When asked how many generators were needed to keep the medical center running in an emergency, project manager Bob Wagner held up a finger and replied: “Just one.” The generators are powered by Cummins diesel engines approximately the same size as a diesel-electric locomotive engine. While the medical center installed four units, it has room to add two more.

“We are exploring cleaner fuel options for the generators,” Wagner said, “but for now, we need to use diesel to meet our current requirements.”

Central Utility Plant

The 52,938-square-foot central utility plant replaces the central plant built in the 1970s and expanded in the 1990s. “It’s three times the size of the old plant,” Gehrke remarked.

The plant is on the north side of Jefferson Street between 1st and 2nd Streets, next to the old plant across the street on 1st. The new plant can run the current buildings at the medical center plus the new office building and north tower St. Luke’s plans to build.

Excavation for the plant began in January 2019. Gehrke anticipated that it would be completely online in April. Once it is up and running, the old plant will be demolished to make room for the next phase of building. For the first time, building and environmental services staff will have room for offices, workspace and amenities in one location.

The plant also houses boilers and chillers for the medical center’s steam heat and air conditioning. The plumbing system also includes feed and return lines for snowmelt water for the hypocaust deicing system under sidewalks and pavement.

The new energy-efficient chillers produce 4,300 tons of cooling. “That’s equivalent to cooling 1,500 homes,” Gehrke said.

The new boilers produce 4.5 million BTUs, enough energy to heat 125 homes. “The boiler can use diesel or natural gas,” Wagner pointed out.

The new plant has twice the capacity as the old one and was built with room to add more boilers and chillers. The frontage of the new plant along Jefferson has ceiling-to-floor windows. “When we need to add new units,” Wagner remarked, “all we need to do is remove the windows and move the new equipment right on in.”

The other aspect of the big windows along Jefferson is the view: at night, the lights are left on so passersby can look in on the boilers, chillers and brightly-painted blue and green steam and water lines.

North Tower Parking Garage

St. Luke’s new North Tower is just an idea on someone’s drawing board, but it already has its own parking garage. Attached to the north side of the physical utility plant, St. Luke’s has built a 375,060-square-foot parking structure with 1,128 stalls. It has six stories above ground and two below.

Like the physical plant, it was begun in January 2019. Construction crews were adding the finishing touches to the garage when the Idaho Business Review toured the buildings.

Entrances to the garage are on 1st and 2nd Streets. Though egresses were roped off, the view of the Idaho Capitol from the upper levels was unobstructed.

The garage has more stalls than any parking structure in the Boise downtown central district. St. Luke’s did a parking study in 2013 when formulating its master plan for future expansion. Based on that study, St. Luke’s determined that those 1,128 stalls would be needed once its master plan is built out.

This article was updated on March 30 to correct the spelling on Bob Wagner’s name.