South Wing Construction Project Faced Obstacles

One of the first problems Nabholz Construction Corp. of Conway faced in building the 258,000-SF addition at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock was the ground.

Construction started on the project in the fall of 2008 but quickly hit a few snags.

“The ground was expansive clay,” said Dewane Funderburg, director of construction at ACH. “It’s real tough to build on that clay because it shifts and gives.”

In addition, the site for the building, which is just south of the hospital, had cobblestone and groundwater, and “we found part of the old city rail line embedded in places,” said David Berry, chief operating officer for ACH.

Geotechnical engineers were called in to help with the foundation for the steel structure, Funderburg said. The pillars had to go 40 feet underground.

Berry said the process delayed the project about six to eight weeks.

“Once we got out of the ground, the thing went like gangbusters,” Berry said.

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While construction work was going on, the crews tried to limit the pounding and smashing at the site.

“There’s always noise, especially when you’re connecting two buildings where you have to break through an outside skin of a building and put a hallway through, which we did in 12 places,” Berry said.

The four-story South Wing will connect each floor with the existing hospital at three locations.

He said the noisy work was done during the day so it didn’t disturb the sleep of the patients. And some patients were moved to other parts of the hospital in an attempt to shield them from the noise.

If, however, the construction work was too loud for a surgery or a patient, construction equipment could be stopped for a few hours, Berry said.

He said the project stopped a handful of times, but not so much that it delayed the schedule.

The ribbon-cutting for the South Wing is scheduled for June 13.