Galveston Consolidation - Shriners Children's Hospital

Specialty hospitals treating children with complex medical needs, Shriners Hospitals for Children provides services to all children and truly has a heart for helping their patients and families through tough scenarios. Henderson has been working with Shriners across the U.S. for more than ten years and have been involved in numerous infrastructure and renovation projects. We have been involved with three fire alarm upgrade projects at the Northern California, Boston, and Houston locations.

Each hospital had a fire alarm system that was outdated and not functioning properly, so Henderson Engineers put plans into place to replace the fire alarm control panel and all the fire alarm initiating devices, in the hospital and detached parking garage, while keeping the fire alarm system operational and minimizing down time.

The first phase of the Northern California (Sacramento) project was to replace the existing fire alarm control panel. This consisted of programming the new fire alarm control panel with all the information of the existing fire alarm control to ensure a smooth switch over. The fire alarm control panels were switched over a four-hour time frame and fire alarm testing of the existing system was started to verify everything was operating correctly. During the next phase we replaced all the fire alarm initiating devices (smoke detectors, duct detectors, pull station, etc.) in the hospital, while keeping the fire alarm system operational. This was done on a floor-by-floor basis. Upon completion and initial testing in the hospital, the next phase was replacement of manual pull stations in the parking garage and subsequent testing. The final phase of the project will be final testing and approval with the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD), which is the authority having jurisdiction over hospitals in California.

Henderson provided a full voice evacuation system replacement of the existing high-rise healthcare facilities in Boston, MA and Houston, TX. Henderson’s services included an initial site investigation and assessment, followed by full construction documents, permitting and extensive coordination with the facility and AHJ for stair pressurization, smoke control, and AHU coordination during the phased construction, which resulted in a successful final approval.