Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler
HAIFA, Northern Israel, Dec 16 2010 (IPS) – At the Rambam medical centre here in Israel s third largest city just 30 odd kilometres from Lebanon, they are working around the clock, racing against time.
Israel is building the largest underground emergency hospital in the world. The 100 million dollar project is slated for completion in May 2012.
It is part of a national effort aimed at protecting hospitals against what officials hope medical emergency facilities will not ever have to endure a conventional, chemical, or biological missile attack.
Ariye Berkovitz, head of the Rambam engineering department, supervises the unusual project: There s no such structure anywhere in the whole world. In regular times, this will serve as a three-floor parking lot accommodating 1,500 cars. But as soon as an emergency situation is declared, within 48 hours we will be able to convert the parking lot into a sophisticated subterranean 2,000-bed hospital that is immune to both conventional and unconventional attack.
Once completed, the emergency hospital will be to cater safely to all the million plus people who live in northern Israel, says Berkovitz.
Rafael Beyar, the hospital director general, recalls that during the 2006 Israel-Hizbullah war Rambam was under constant rocket attack for a full month: Every day, there were at least 10 or 15 alarms. Some 60 rockets fell within a one kilometre radius of our hospital. We had to move patients to basements; we had to evacuate parts of the hospital, and we needed to make sure we were able to treat all the patients brought into the intensive care unit under conditions of fire.
The new emergency facility will be able to work under conditions both of fire and chemical warfare, he adds confidently. In the event of a chemical or biological attack, a system of pumps and filters will clean any polluted air, he says.
The pouring of the foundation began in October. For 36 straight hours more than a thousand cement mixers ferried concrete to the site. To complete the foundations, four more similar operations will be carried out this winter.
The location of this national emergency project is most unusual, lying as it does on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea but actually below sea level.
What characterises this project, says Berkovitz, is the complexity of the geological and hydrological planning. No fewer than two of the three parking lot floors will be transformed into fully operational hospital units below sea level.
At any given moment, 24 hours a day, a hundred pumps are draining 12,000 cubic metres of seawater at a depth of ten metres underneath the mass concrete raft foundation, he explains proudly. The brackish groundwater is then filtered, cleaned and moved back to the sea.
Over the coming 18 months, planners expect the raft foundation, and the underground construction above it, to act as a counterweight to the pressure and the lift forces caused by the sea. In addition, horizontal and vertical sealing sheets will prevent infiltration so that the parking lot hospital will be totally insulated.
Insulation is the guiding principle.
The engineer tells us the hospital is designed to be both self-sufficient, and buttoned up just like a bunker . He adds: We will be able to store enough oxygen, drinking water, food and medical supplies to allow the medical teams who are locked in from the outside world to operate for up to 24 hours under the most radical conditions.
We will have four full operating theatres, labs, and an X-ray department, he adds. Protected applications will supply telecoms, light and medical gases.
Berkovitz leads into what he calls the most important room through a corridor linking into Rambam s existing fully protected emergency room that is already equipped with a state-of-the-art trauma unit.
Inaugurated in 2009, the trauma unit usually serves people seriously hurt in traffic accidents. Recently, it was also called on to deal with the most severe casualties of the wild fire that ravaged the nearby Carmel hills, claiming over 40 lives.
Of course, noted Berkovitz matter-of-factly, there is one threat that we re not dealing with at the moment the threat of a nuclear bomb.
The mission of the specially-designed home front hospital is not just to draw up doomsday plans, Israeli government officials are quick to point out. Above the underground emergency hospital, four new buildings will be erected at a cost of an additional 250 million dollars. They will include paediatric, oncology and cardiovascular wings, and also a futuristic biomedical discovery tower for medical research.
In Israel, though, the future of medicine lies not only in health prevention. More and more of the country s health centres are within missile range from hostile organisations and countries.
Says Rafael Beyar wishfully, We do hope that that there will be no more wars in the region. We know equally, however, that in the event of war, we will be on the front line here. And, we have to be ready for anything.
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