2015/10/26 - Walter's Blog: Progress at St. Elizabeth's!

The new St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and Medical Campus has been under construction for a while now but it doesn’t look like much has happened. What is going on over there? Well, a lot actually. For a project as large as this, significant underground work is necessary before they start working on the building.

In particular, this project needed considerable mine remediation to stabilize the foundation. You may be aware that our region is filled with abandoned coal mines that occasionally collapse and can cause instability in the soil. St. Elizabeth’s Hospital will be a multi-story building and must be operational at all times. Therefore, the coal mines had to filled in with grout (like a concrete slurry) before construction could begin. This is an extraordinary cost for a business, so the O’Fallon City Council committed to assist with the mine remediation through a TIF District and a bond issue. The final cost to remediate the mines was $5.6 million, which sounds like a lot but was less than originally estimated. A municipal bond will be issued in the next few weeks to cover that cost and will be paid back over time with property taxes generated from the medical campus.

In addition to the mine remediation, work also had to be done to level the dirt and to install water lines, sewer lines, and storm drains. A major gas line runs through the property and needed to be moved. Then the concrete foundation had to be poured to cover the footprint of the hospital.

It is our understanding that the project should go vertical within in the next couple of weeks. Structural steel will be placed into the foundation and begin creating the skeleton of the building. Completion is estimated for spring of 2017.

This is an exciting project that will have long term positive impacts for O’Fallon. It seems to be taking a long time to get going but once the steel starts going up, the progress will be much more visible.