ResilienceJoplin, Missouri hospital re-built to withstand powerful tornadoes

In 2011 St. John’s Medical Center in Joplin, Missouri was devastated by one of the most ferocious tornadoes in U.S history. Today, Mercy Hospital Joplin stands on the site of the former hospital, occupying a new structure designed to survive future tornadoes, with windows that can withstand 250-mile-per-hour winds.

The 2011 tornado left 158 people dead and destroyed several buildings. “It was just unbelievable. I mean, just the devastation and the damage to the hospital,” says John Farnen, executive director of planning, design, and construction at Mercy Health System in St. Louis, the parent company of the former St. John’s Medical Center and the new Mercy Hospital Joplin. “What you saw on television just couldn’t do justice to when you saw it for real.”

In the weeks following the disaster, architects and engineers studied the ruins of the hospital, its torn-up roof, and crushed generator, and took their discoveries to the drawing board. Four years later, Norman Morgan of HKS Inc., a Dallas-based architecture firm, unveils the distinctive features of the new hospital. It is covered in concrete and brick paneling and houses an underground bunker where generators and boilers are kept. Should another natural disaster strike Joplin, the reinforcements will help the hospital remain open — and not just for emergency medical care, but “to also provide essential community services as the most resistant or significant buildings in communities,” says Robin Guenther, a principal with Perkins+Will, an architecture firm headquartered in Atlanta.

Guenther co-authored a report for the Department of Health and Human Services on how hospitals can better withstand natural disasters. She says that many hospitals may need to be rebuilt, particularly on the coasts, where flooding poses a risk. “Those hospitals actually need to be built upside down, meaning all of their key equipment needs to actually be on the roof,” she says.

According to KCUR News, the storm reinforcements completed at Mercy Hospital Joplin added about 2.5 percent or $12 million, to the total construction costs, but Guenther says the job can be done for 1 percent of the construction costs or even less in areas less prone to storms. She admits, however, that it will be tough to convince hospitals to rebuild. “We increase the level of strength of a building wall or roof based on a disaster that causes damage, not before it happens,” she says.

Harold Brooks, a meteorologist with the National Severe Storm Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, says that some businesses are uncertain about the actual danger posed by a tornado. “If we look at the probability of any particular structure getting hit, the most likely for, say, an F2 and greater tornado — the kind of thing that’ll take the roof off of a house — is about once every 4,000 years, and that’s somewhere in southern Oklahoma,” he says. Brooks is reviewing the effects of climate change on tornadoes, and says rather than occurring one at a time, tornadoes are now happening more often in different places at the same time.

“Overall, if we look at an average of, say, ten years, the number of tornadoes and the locations appear to be just about the same as they would be any of the 10-year periods we look at, but the days would look different,” he says. “You’d get to that same number of tornadoes by having a small number of very big days and not very many small days.”

Ron Marshall coordinates hospital preparedness for the Kansas Hospital Association,. He says his constituents understand the importance of building preventative reinforcements into hospitals, but instead of new buildings, storm-hardening will more likely happen. “We’d all love to go out and build a new tornado-safe hospital, but in today’s reality of economics and health care, that’s unfortunately not really an option,” Marshall says.