Whitehorse Daily Star

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Photo by Vince Fedoroff

TIGHT QUARTERS – Construction at Whitehorse General Hospital has squeezed parking availability. The former lots, located where the heavy equipment is seen in this photo taken this morning, have been eliminated. Patients and visitors now park on what was previously the circular grassed area in front of the hospital’s main entrance.

Work complicating parking for patients, visitors

The inevitable inconveniences that come with large infrastructure construction have begun at the Whitehorse General Hospital.

By Aimee O'Connor on August 26, 2015

The inevitable inconveniences that come with large infrastructure construction have begun at the Whitehorse General Hospital.

“We have heard from patients that have experienced issues with parking,” James Low, the spokesperson for the Yukon Hospital Corp., said this morning.

A warning was sent out last Sunday that patient and visitor parking areas have been moved to a temporary parking area in front of the hospital, over what was formerly a grassed area.

Most of the former paved parking lots, which had been off to the right of Hospital Road as vehicles approached the complex, have been ripped up.

The parking shift is part of the “transitional phase” for the hospital expansion project, Low said.

Workers are moving to get infrastructure in place for the new two-storey hospital wing, which is expected to start to take shape in the spring of 2016.

The disfigured former parking lots are part of the site preparation crews are working on, along with putting in underground systems, changes to the roadway and building a new ambulance station.

All of this work is to accommodate the expansion to the current hospital, whose construction ended about 20 years ago.

“It is not ideal, but we are doing our best to maintain the same number of (parking) spaces,” Low said.

Despite the complaints about parking availability, the corporation insists the numbers are the same as they were before.

“We had about 450 parking spaces at the hospital before construction and we maintain the same number now,” Low said.

Between 15 and 20 spaces will be added this fall, beside the existing ambulance station.

As part of the project and to make room for expansion, the ambulance station will be relocated from its current site by the hospital to a new building nearby on Hospital Road.

What’s being used as a makeshift parking lot now is where visitors and patients will park once the expansion is complete.

“Once all of the construction is done, the new, larger lot will have more spaces and patients will only have to cross the road once,” Low said.

The project is a massive undertaking with an even larger price tag– $72 million, to be precise, which is far more than it cost to build the hospital.

The current facility was planned with fewer beds than the 1950s-era building it replaced on the same site.

Craig Tuton, who chairs the hospital corporation’s board of trustees, said the expansion represents the first large-scale enhancement to the hospital in nearly 20 years.

The overdue hospital enlargement includes a new emergency department, improvements to the hospital’s power infrastructure, and new data for information systems.

Included in the $72-million price tag is the construction of the MRI facility that was completed in January this year.

The renovation is primarily funded by the Yukon government, with about $2 million raised by the Yukon Hospital Foundation for the MRI scanner.

In May, the construction contract was awarded to PCL Constructors Westcoast Inc. with design parter CEI Architecture.

After releasing the formal design in June, workers dug their shovels into the ground last month.

Construction is expected to be completed in the fall of 2017.

Comments (3)

Up 23 Down 1

Groucho d'North on Aug 29, 2015 at 9:28 am

YG should have invested in a better location back when the expansion was done in the 90s. A more central location for WGH up near the highway with room to grow and able to better service the future growth of the city. Now to stretch a dollar, every remaining square meter of the current site is being squeezed to accommodate new requirements. I wonder what the situation will be 20 years from now? We need planners with some vision to the future rather than the skinflint decision makers who count money over thoughtful progress.

Up 17 Down 1

Curious Yukoner on Aug 27, 2015 at 2:13 pm

So what happens to the new ambulance station built near Takhini Sub. A couple years back.... that cost millions as well. Will it remain in service or will all ambulance ops move back to the hospital location once this construction is complete?

Up 42 Down 2

June Jackson on Aug 26, 2015 at 7:06 pm

Yeah..it's a pain, but it isn't the patients and visitors parking there..it's the workers.

Someone going for treatment is lucky to get a place to park at #4.

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