Sections of wall, about 12 feet high and 8 feet wide, slotted together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle Thursday morning, as construction workers erected the main building at Kaiser Permanente’s new Kona clinic.
The wall segments are designed in California and built in Cleveland, then shipped to Kawaihae Harbor to be brought by truck to the North Kona construction site mauka of Honokohau Harbor, said Benett Bolek, team manager for Kaiser Permanente’s National Facility Services.
“This was a pilot project,” Bolek said, describing how national Kaiser officials wanted to find a way to make building clinics “faster, better (and) cheaper.”
He laughed as he said he wasn’t sure why Kona — in the middle of the ocean, with a challenging, sloped construction site — would be the ideal site for such a test project. Maybe, Kaiser’s Director of Communications and Public Relations Laura Lott said, Kona is a good place to test the new construction model because of those challenges.
Going the prefabricated wall route saves Kaiser money in several ways.
“It’s following a factory methodology of just-in-time production,” he said. “The quality control in a factory setting is much higher than on a site.”
The wall construction company on the mainland uses less waste, and having to only put the already built wall segments in place means less waste here, too, Bolek said.
Using the prefabricated pieces does result in fewer workers on the ground in Kona, Bolek said. Kaiser has a union contract and is using union workers, he added.
The completed clinic will have three buildings, which will take about 360 of the panels to construct. Each panel is comprised of steel studs and plywood, with insulation on the outside to increase energy efficiency, Bolek said.
Kaiser officials recently approved a photovoltaic plan to power the building with solar energy, Bolek said. He didn’t know offhand how large the proposed system would be, but said it would be large. Now Kaiser needs to get Hawaiian Electric Light Co.’s approval to tie into the grid.
“HELCO is very limited on what they allow on the grid,” Bolek said. “It would significantly lower the cost of our operation.”
The project, including the land purchase several years ago, is expected to cost about $50 million. Work is ahead of schedule, Bolek said, and Kaiser is still intending to open the clinic in the summer of 2014. The new clinic will be about 40,000 square feet, more than Kaiser’s footprint on all of Hawaii Island, officials said last fall during the groundbreaking ceremony. The existing Kona clinic has about 14,000 square feet, spread over offices on three floors. Kaiser has about 22,000 subscribers on Hawaii Island.
Lott said the construction and expanded space positions the company to begin seeking even more subscribers here.
