Main Palo Alto Hospital Campus

For nearly two decades, Stanford Medicine—comprised of Stanford Health Care (SHC), Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH) and the Stanford University School of Medicine—has been actively engaged in the development and execution of plans to ensure the safety of its hospital facilities in the event of a major earthquake, including compliance with seismic requirements from the State of California.  These seismic requirements entail meeting certain levels of structural performance by 2020, and meeting additional nonstructural requirements such as anchoring equipment and establishing emergency water and fuel supplies to ensure even greater earthquake resilience by 2030¹.

Stanford Medicine began its planning for these seismic safety requirements in the 2000s, and by 2007 had submitted a formal application to the City of Palo Alto for a Facilities Renewal and Replacement Project (“Renewal Project”). One of the key objectives of the Renewal Project—which consisted of renovation and replacement of SHC, LPCH, and School of Medicine facilities—was to achieve timely compliance with State seismic safety requirements.  The Renewal Project received final approval from the Palo Alto City Council in 2011, and construction activity began shortly thereafter, upon issuance of building permits.

In more recent years, SHC and LPCH reached significant Renewal Project milestones with the opening of their new, state-of-the-art inpatient facilities—which were designed and constructed to meet the highest seismic safety standards, and to remain fully operational even immediately after a major earthquake.  In addition to building these new earthquake-resilient facilities, SHC and LPCH ensured that all of their preexisting acute care facilities met the structural performance requirements in advance of the State’s 2020 deadline. Today, renovations and additions to these preexisting facilities are ongoing to modernize the patient care environment, and to ensure even greater resilience as well as compliance with new nonstructural seismic safety standards in time for the State’s 2030 deadline.

A summary of the key projects addressing seismic safety is provided here:

• Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Expansion (LPCH Main Building): In late 2017, LPCH completed construction of an expanded hospital facility, now known as the Main building, and opened its doors to patient care.  The Main building provides patients with the most modern clinical advancements and technology, while also creating a more patient- and family-centered environment of care, with additional single-patient rooms and more spaces for families to be with their child during treatment and recovery. LPCH Main was designed and constructed to meet the highest ratings for structural performance and for nonstructural equipment and systems critical to patient care, allowing the Hospital to continue operations immediately after a major earthquake.
• LPCH West Renovations: Inside LPCH West, the preexisting Children’s Hospital building, multiple ongoing construction projects are modernizing the infrastructure to meet the State’s 2030 nonstructural performance deadline, as well as to provide a more comfortable patient experience.  Upon completion of these infrastructure improvements, LPCH West will have sufficient emergency water and fuel storage capacity to support ongoing operations in the event of a multi-day utilities outage resulting from a major earthquake—just like LPCH Main.
• New Stanford Hospital at 500 Pasteur: In November 2019, SHC opened its new hospital at 500 Pasteur Drive to patient care—the facility features an advanced interventional platform that combines surgical, procedural and imaging technologies to improve the precision of medical care.  As the only Level-1 Trauma Center between San Francisco and San Jose, the 500 Pasteur facility is built to withstand the strongest earthquake and designed for readiness in the event of disaster. The facility meets the highest ratings for structural performance as well as for nonstructural equipment and systems critical to patient care, allowing the Hospital to continue operations immediately after a major earthquake.
• SHC Renewal Program at 300 Pasteur Drive: Within its preexisting hospital facilities at 300 Pasteur Drive, Stanford Health Care has embarked on a series of renovations to improve the patient care environment and meet nonstructural performance requirements. This work began in 2019 and is proceeding in phases over the next several years, and will include an addition of two new bed towers which will ultimately enable SHC to transition inpatient care from the original Hospital buildings constructed in the 1950s to new, state-of-the-art facilities.  These renovations also include the installation of emergency storage tanks to enable uninterrupted patient care in the 300 Pasteur hospital immediately after a major earthquake.

Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley

Similar to the Palo Alto campus, the Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley campus in Pleasanton is also undergoing renovations which will increase seismic resilience.  Specifically, improvements will be made to existing infrastructure, and emergency water and wastewater storage tanks will be installed to ensure that normal operations can continue immediately after a major earthquake, even in the event of a multi-day utilities outage.  The Stanford Health Care Livermore campus no longer offers general acute care services.

As Stanford Medicine’s facilities continue to evolve, our emergency management plans evolve in parallel, so that at each stage of infrastructure improvements we are able to maintain our resilience.

For any questions related to Stanford Medicine’s seismic safety efforts and compliance with the State’s seismic deadlines, please reach out to hospitalconstruction@stanfordhealthcare.org.

¹ California state seismic safety requirements for hospitals have evolved over time, and the relevant requirements described here are primarily derived from Senate Bill (SB) 1953, passed in 1994, and subsequent amendments. SB 1953 established seismic performance standards for existing hospitals and set deadlines for compliance.