From Military.com:
“After Years of Delays,
Construction on the $969 Million Landstuhl Hospital Replacement Is Starting”
Nearly eight years after the
Defense Department held a groundbreaking ceremony in Germany for a new hospital
to replace Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, construction on the building is
set to begin, Defense Health Agency officials announced Jan. 19. Despite the
event in October 2014 that heralded construction of the Rhine Ordnance Barracks
Medical Center Replacement, no walls have actually been built. And the original
goal to complete the facility in 2022 has been pushed to 2027. According to a
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spokeswoman, the groundbreaking represented
"the beginning of the overall campus project," and since then, more
than $200 million in infrastructure has been built, including an access control
point, bridge, utilities, roads and environmental impact mitigation.
The 1950s-era Landstuhl Regional
Medical Center is renowned for being the first stop for service members wounded
in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. Patients across the years have
included the wounded from the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut,
Lebanon; those injured on the guided missile destroyer Cole in 2000; and the
wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan. Civilians also have been sent to Landstuhl:
Its surgeons famously treated ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt
when the vehicle they were filming in struck a roadside bomb near Baghdad in
2006.
The new facility, roughly seven
miles from Landstuhl, will employ roughly 2,500 people and also house the 86th
Medical Group clinic, now at Ramstein Air Base. Design of the center also has
been underway for several years, a "complex process that required multiple
design submittal iterations to resolve code conflicts prior to construction
award to ensure a modern, world-class facility," said Catherine Bingham,
medical program manager at the Corps of Engineers' Europe District. "We
are very proud of the hard work and collaboration between the U.S. and German
partners," Bingham said in an email. "The whole team is focused on
delivering this world class healthcare facility for our service members and
their families." The Defense Health Agency announced Jan. 19 that a $969
million contract has been signed with the companies Zublin and Gilbane under a
joint venture.
The 985,000-square-foot facility
is expected to serve roughly 200,000 service members, families and American
civilians in Germany and throughout the region, with nine operating rooms, 120
exam rooms and 68 beds with a surge capacity for 25 more. When work began on
the replacement in 2014, its expected completion date was 2022. The timeline
was revised in 2018 to December 2023, with a goal to be operational by 2024. Now,
according to the Defense Health Agency, the expected completion is in late
2027.
There had been concerns that the
construction funds for the Landstuhl replacement project would be diverted for
President Donald Trump's project to build a wall along the U.S. border with
Mexico, part of $21 billion in unobligated military construction funds that
were marked for projects but not spent. The DoD ultimately shifted $3.6 billion
to help pay for the wall and later was to contribute an additional $6.4
billion, but the Landstuhl funds were not included. President Joe Biden
canceled funding for the border wall project on Jan. 20, 2021, allowing the DoD
to reinvest $2.2 billion back into its planned projects. Zublin is a
construction company in Stuttgart that has built other U.S. military facilities
in Germany; Gilbane was responsible for building Fort Belvoir Community
Hospital in Virginia.
^ This is long over-due and
hopefully there are no more delays. ^
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