You’ve probably heard about the Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, China, which was built in 10 days. I’m trying to understand how it was done.
The simple answer is “lots of people and equipment working around the clock” and this is obviously the case, videos and pictures show many excavators working where a typical American construction site might only have two or three. Also, it appears that the individual rooms were prefabricated.
However, this doesn’t answer all the questions, such as:
[ol]
[li]It’s built on a concrete base, and to my knowledge, concrete takes several days to cure, right? So they wouldn’t be able to continue building until the slab had cured.[/li][li]Where did all the prefab rooms come from? Did they have them sitting around just waiting for this sort of emergency? [/li][li]A hospital is a relatively complex build, with several (presumably hardened) systems that you wouldn’t need in a business or residence. Even with an abundance of skilled workers, they would still have to coordinate with one another, which takes time. How did they manage that in the allotted time?[/li][li]Does that time include stocking all the rooms with the required equipment, which also presumably needs to be set up and calibrated before it’s used? Were people readying the rooms while other parts of the building were still being assembled? [/li][li]A building needs a roof, which presumably requires the rest of the building to be in place, if not complete. How was that done?[/li][/ol]
It appears to be modular construction, so those units may even have been prebuilt awaiting such a emergency to move to where it is needed. Slabs can also be premade and moved on site.
Also the basic hospital is really a bed for the sick to rest and a attendant staff. It shares a common root with hostel where a traveler would go for a night’s sleep and recover from the toils of the journey. Since this is basically a single function hospital, to treat one disease, I think they could forgo most of the complex stuff found in most hospitals. Basically a place where people can be isolated and treated for the virus in some degree of comfort. One is not going there to get their appendix out.
From the videos, it looks like they poured the slabs on site. They may have used “high-early” concrete (high strength, early cure), which, depending on the mix, can set up in as little as 12 hours.
Well, those Aljazeeria pics are pretty informative. Yeah, the walls look modular, even flimsy, but are likely not actually easily knocked down, they just seem that way. The beds are short, and fixed, not the expensive, reclining beds I’ve seen in US hospitals. Impressively, they have the CT scanner set up, and they will need that for monitoring chest x-rays. Pretty impressive all around.
From info in one video, the 10 days (although some sources say it took eight; maybe that doesn’t include the slab curing time?) doesn’t include bringing in the hospital equipment, just the building and major systems.
Thin elevated post-tensioned concrete slabs definitely needs the full 28 day cure time since they’re engineered so tightly. Normal structural concrete can get by with just a week of curing. In this case, with a simple slab on grade, it can be ready to go after just a day or two with the proper admixtures. It helps that the modular construction leads to pretty light loads that are also widely distributed. They can also just make the slab thicker to get the bearing capacity up sooner, it just means that after a month it will be way stronger than it needs to be. So it’s not as much like a traditional building with footings, foundations, piers, or piles with multiple floors of heavy concrete and steel above. This is more like a field of shipping containers stacked no more than two high on a big parking lot.
Regarding the first question, if pre-fab construction is a big thing in China (which I have every reason to believe it is) then there must be factories churning out the pieces all the time. I guess a number of other less urgent projects all got bumped by ten days.
I would also imagine that they already know how to build a pre-fab hospital on totally flat ground, and that the design is a pre-existing one, which simply had to be grabbed and implemented again, probably by people who had done this before (on a less urgent timescale)
Well, the one in Beijing from 15 years ago largely sat empty of people since the SARS crisis ended. They are now planning to use it for new cases, but it requires extensive renovation before it is habitable.
I think they weren’t abandoned per se - it’s just that they were built in anticipation of demand, and the demand took far longer than expected to develop.
That hospital is not a structure intended to last. Perhaps it will, but isolation is what is needed to control infections.
Premade everything, quick dry cement, metal roofing - cheap buildings are thrown up that quick everywhere in the world.