Humber River Health is suing the consortium contracted to build and maintain its Toronto hospital for $100 million, alleging that negligent design and construction is creating health and safety problems for patients and staff.
The lawsuit, filed in early April, alleges that a “sizable portion” of the hospital’s floors are not level or flat and that some of the flooring itself is deteriorating.
“Floor levelness is a critical operational and safety issue,” reads Humber River Health’s claim, filed in Ontario Superior Court.
“Non-level floors make it difficult for staff to move equipment, supplies, food, and patients on wheeled transportation devices. Often, wheeled carts have to be placed behind rubber stoppers to prevent the carts from sliding out of position.”
As someone that has been a surveyor on a couple of hospital construction projects, this is more common than you think. Usually it’s fixed before it’s too late and we will literally do a 3D scan of the concrete slabs to show very accurately how flat it is so it can be mended before they move on. For things like apartment buildings the tolerance is relatively flexible within a couple centimeters depending on how large the building is, but for things like hospitals they usually have a tolerance of like less than a centimeter in some cases. What this sounds like to me is that they either knew it was wrong and went with it anyway (worst case), didn’t know their tolerances, didn’t get it verified by a surveyor, hired subpar subcontractor, or the construction company never worked on a project with this kind of scope.
I think they are screwed no matter what. Best case scenario it’s one if the subcontractors they hired for layout that fucked it up. Every other scenario i can think of just seems like incompetence to me. I’m not gonna say they should have just done it correctly the first time because mistakes happen. I mean, half my job was figuring out how to fix something that got messed up. It’s the fact that they didn’t rectify it during the construction process that really fucks them here.
Same thing happened to Thunder Bay’s hospital. Built on the Fort William flood plain, on what was marsh at the time, it didn’t take long for the slabs to start shifting. There were safety cones all over the place warning people to watch their step.