A fire in any commercial or institutional facility is a crisis. But when the facility in question is a 341,000-square-foot hospital and the crisis is a 10-alarm fire that results in $90 million in damages, the level of criticality and complexity is off the charts.
Such was the situation facing Brian Backoff, senior director of facilities and engineering for Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital in February 2023. The fire that started in the hospital’s transformer room early that morning shut down the facility for 18 months.
It also enabled Backoff and his team to rebuild and replace hospital systems and components, and it created opportunities to upgrade and expand key areas — but only after navigating a fair amount of uncharted territory.
“Obviously, this doesn't happen every day,” Backoff says of the fire and ensuing recovery process. “There was no road map.”
Backoff nearly had a front-row seat for the fire.
“Our main switchgear, which is located inside the hospital, started arcing and had a fire inside the room,” says Backoff, who oversees facilities and engineering for the hospital and its off-site properties. “My office is located right above where this happened. I was here at 7 a.m., and I knew immediately something was wrong because I could almost feel the air become stagnant. Fire alarm systems went off, and there were loud explosions and lots of loud noises.”
About 160 patients were evacuated and relocated to other area hospitals, and there were no injuries or deaths resulting from the fire, including all the workers in the facility that day. But the fire did force firefighters to act quickly to prevent even more damage to the structure.
“We took out not only our normal power to the hospital, but we also took out our emergency power probably 10 minutes apart,” he says. “That controlled some of the arcing, but the flames were still shooting in the room.” Firefighters then discovered a 2-inch oxygen main had burst and was feeding the fire, prompting them to shut off oxygen.
“Once we shut that off, then they were actually able to get into the room and start treating the fire,” he says. “That room obviously filled with a lot of electrical smoke, and the smoke then followed all the conduits that go up. This is a five-story building plus a penthouse, so it was a chimney effect.
“From a fire standpoint, it was contained in the room and above that room where we have a cafeteria. It was contained to that as far as fire damage, but the majority of the damage was smoke damage throughout the whole facility.”
As hospital officials started assessing damage, Backoff says he knew the age of the facility and its various additions over the years was going to complicate the planning and recovery process.
“The hospital itself has a lot of age to it,” Backoff says. “The original part of the hospital was built in 1897. We have a wing that was added in 1947. Another wing was added in 1972, and then another wing was added in 1985. Again, it’s all different ages of construction and all different ages of mechanical equipment.”
The team spent a week or two after the fire doing determining whether the situation called for a full demolition of the hospital or its renovation. Further hampering the assessment and planning was a lack of reliable documentation for the building. To help with the evaluations, they brought in electrical contractors, who immediately asked for the hospital’s blueprints.
“We didn't have old blueprints,” Backoff says. “We knew what we had, but we didn't really know what we had. It was almost starting from ground zero.”
The lack of documentation of the hospital and its numerous additions meant Backoff’s team encountered a series of unexpected challenges during the assessment and inspection process — everything from asbestos to confusing electrical systems.
“We would be chasing ductwork thinking it was going somewhere, and we found out it was going somewhere else,” he says. “We found a lot of equipment that had been abandoned over the years, whether it was sprinkler valves, all sorts of stuff that no one ever knew existed. We covered every square inch, took down a lot of walls, opened chase walls.”
The reconstruction and renovation of Brockton Hospital targeted areas of the facility affected by the fire, upgrading the entire electrical system.
The hospital added 25 new electrical closets throughout the hospital. The construction also included a new 2,700 square-foot addition at the north end of the hospital to house new switchgear. The addition allowed Backoff and his team to separate daily and emergency systems and provide new generators and transformers on site in order to prevent disruption to services if a future disaster were to occur.
Other components of the renovation and construction project included a new outpatient surgical facility, a redesigned emergency department and an updated behavioral health facility. The final phase of hospital reconstruction focused on completing upgrades to the maternity and pediatric units.
The 18-month shutdown after the fire also gave Backoff and his team an opportunity that is rare for in-house maintenance and engineering teams in healthcare facilities.
“There’s never a chance when the hospital's closed,” he says. “That gave us an opportunity to do other projects. We were able to renovate our emergency department, which we've been trying to do for years. Trying to do that while we're open not only would cost a lot more money, but there’s the pain of taking a room a day and being only able to do a room at a time.
“We had a project that was queued up before the fire, but this allowed us to do it quicker: We added a 1.5 megawatt solar array canopy to the campus, which produces energy for us. Trying to do that while we are open was going to be very costly and very disruptive to our business every day.”
Despite the destruction and displacement the fire created, Backoff says the recovery process also offered valuable lessons.
Get involved. Even without much documentation, Backoff says his department played a central role in determining the scope and content of the reconstruction.
“I looked at myself and my department as the blueprints, so we were the ones that knew everything,” he says. “We worked with the design team and with their engineers, and whether it was HVAC, electrical, we all had input. We were involved, whether it was mechanical, HVAC, plumbing, we were involved in the whole design of it.”
Maintenance matters. “It has given me a lot of opportunity for the future because it has shown people in the everyday operations that don't work in facilities just how important this stuff is and how important it is to maintain it. People always ask us in facilities, ‘Why do you have to do a fire drill? Why do you have to check our fire doors all the time?’
“That's the type of stuff that I took out of this project. It helps us now when we go out and educate. They don't just look at us as a barrier. They understand now why we have to do it and what's behind it. There's a bigger appreciation for us overall, and it's going to help us throughout the different projects that we might have coming down the pipeline.”
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.
