Sound Check

Sound Check

Ultra-quiet isn't a term

normally associated with power plants. At least not until one of the largest Gulf Coast community hospitals called in a design team to bring down the noise.

architecture/engineering by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

The idea of turning a 34,000-square-foot building designed to house up to 10,000 tons of water-cooling machines, more than 4,000 volts worth of power sockets and three vast steam boilers into a near-soundproof room sounds impossible.

It almost was. Nashville-based Smith Seckman Reid, Inc. had to engineer a physical solution to the noise while engineering a political solution to gain neighborhood support.

They went two for two.

The SSR team had been retained by Sarasota Memorial Hospital to design a new power plant for the hospital's tightly confined campus headquarters south of downtown Sarasota.

And even though the new plant would only be a few hundred yards away from the old one, the move was deemed to be an essential part of the hospital's long-range master plan. In fact, relocating the power plant from the hospital's main entrance at Waldemere Street and U.S. 41 to an empty lot further down the street would clear room for the hospital to build its much needed new patient tower, with up to 220 beds.

Says SSR Vice President Bruce Loeppke: "We are doing a heart transplant on the hospital."

The project's significance, however, was no match for what would be a yearlong anti-power plant movement from nearby residents. Several advisory councils were formed, dozens of meetings were held with city and hospital officials and a Web site, www.nopowerplant.com, was even formed for a time.

"We were met with some pretty good resistance," says Tom Perigo, the director of architecture and facility planning at SMH. "They didn't like the idea."

Hence, the SSR team was left with an unusual charge: Design a building to store noisy machines that could be barely be heard just a few feet outside its walls. In the crowded neighborhood, a mix of homes, stores and medical offices, the challenge was acute. "The site is so compact," SSR project manager Michael Gundrum says, "that the property line is literally right outside the building."

The design team spent about 15 months on the planning phase of the project, which came to fruition last September when a committee made up of architects, construction executives, hospital officials and area residents approved final plans. Since the new power pant and patient tower didn't require a zoning change, there was no need to bring it before the Sarasota City Commission.

"Basically, what we ended up with is a mason cooling system that's actually built into the tower," says Andy Capps, a vice president at SSR's Sarasota office. "It's one of a kind."

'Tasting really good'

Some of the challenges the design team had to overcome in order to move the project ahead were also one of a kind. To start with, a project like this, with such specific noise minimization requirements, had never been done - neither in Florida or nationwide - so there were no models to study. Says Gundrum: "No one could find a design that fit what we needed."

And there was a multitude of tests, from running complicated sound and noise simulations for neighborhood groups that cost more than $6 million, to configuring traffic patterns for the duration of the project in an already heavily congested area.

So far, the effort has paid off: Site work on the power plant phase of the project, run by the Tampa office of Skanska, has already begun and full-construction is expected to be in swing by the end of the summer. The power plant could be operational as early as next May.

"This has been a long time coming," says Perigo. "This is tasting really good right now."

Perigo is referring to a project that, in concept at least, goes as far back as 1993. And it was 1996 when hospital executives first approached planners and designers at SSR's Fort Lauderdale office about the power plant and several other hospital-related projects.

But the power plant project was continuously put on hold and over the next decade it dropped further down the hospital's priority list. Meanwhile, SSR, which opened an office in Sarasota primarily for SMH-related work, began focusing its attention on other Gulf Coast business opportunities. The firm opened an office in Tampa, where it later did work for Tampa General Hospital and ultimately moved its Sarasota office to Lakewood Ranch, where it now has 44 employees.

The power plant project was resurrected in 2005 by the hospital's new chief executive, Gwen MacKenzie, who put an emphasis on the hospital's master plan - specifically the new patient tower. The power plant, initially built in the 1960s, moved back to the top of the list because it was located right next to where the hospital wanted to build its new tower.

A good sound

Rebuilding the plant on the current site was deemed impossible, not only because it would be too close to the new patient tower. It also was impossible because the hospital must have a functional power plant running 24 hours a day and the existing facility couldn't be turned off to allow the replacement to be built.

So in late 2005, hospital executives and a few planners from SSR, including Capps and Loeppke, began to meet with city officials and area residents to talk about the first step with the rejuvenated project: finding a home for the new power plant.

But meetings that started out congenial soon turned acrimonious. First, in an effort to appease the group of about several hundred people living in the area of the hospital, Capps' team at SSR tinkered with the actual design of the plant, so that it looked like a sleek building, not a steam-emitting power plant.

That tinkering proved to be far easier than the sound issues. Area residents, according to Perigo, were determined to make sure the noise levels in the neighborhood would virtually remain unchanged. With that as a backdrop, in late 2006, SSR, teaming with a sound engineering firm and set up a meeting in the hospital auditorium for an experiment. The intricate test involved planting speakers in the backyards of about 50 area homes that were hooked up to a power source in the auditorium, to simulate the noise of the power plant.

The test was a 200-decibel failure. Residents complained, loudly, to both hospital and city officials, that the new power plant would come with an annoyingly distinct humming noise.

The hospital and SSR then hired an acoustic engineer, says Perigo, who created a method of muffling the humming noise, which came from the giant fans of the cooling power blades. A simulation for that procedure was conducted by placing giant speakers on the roof of the hospital parking garage and turning up the volume for what the power plant would sound like for three straight days.

The second test worked. In fact, it worked so well, says Capps, that a few residents didn't even believe the speakers were actually on. Capps and Perigo took those people up to the roof, mere feet from the speakers, so they could hear for themselves.

"We went from sites like nopowerplant.com to residents liking what they hear," says Perigo. "We went 180 degrees."

REVIEW SUMMARY

Businesses. Smith Seckman Reid, Inc., Sarasota

Industry. Engineering, planning

Key. The firm conquered one of its biggest tests with a major project at Sarasota Memorial Hospital.