BCD was awarded the 2021 Engineering Excellence Grand Award by ACEC-MS during a YouTube video presentation on May 25th. The award recognized BCD’s expertise in geotechnical design and construction value engineering services provided to the University of Mississippi Medical Center during construction of a recent $180 million expansion to the UMMC Children’s Hospital in Jackson, MS.
The expansion, which included a heavily loaded, seven-story tower structure and attached multi-level parking garage sites located immediately adjacent to the current Batson Children’s Hospital building, resulted in foundation and site work challenges for the design and construction team due to the presence of highly expansive Yazoo clays. Hundreds of specialized 24-in. high-capacity auger cast piles never before used in this area, a specialized crawl space design, site-specific seismic testing, and construction of a specialized soil nail wall were necessary to support and protect the building foundations from the expansive Yazoo clays.
Other members of the UMMC Children’s Hospital Expansion team were project construction manager and general contractor Brasfield & Gorrie; hospital tower designers/architects HDR of Dallas, TX and Cooke Douglass Farr Lemons of Jackson, MS; and building foundation specialist Morris-Shea Bridge Co., Inc. of Birmingham, AL.
