Setting A Hospital In The San Francisco Bay Area

Submitted By swestr18
Words: 1004
Pages: 5

Coordinates: 37.742822 -122.412418
Factors:
The coordinates above were chosen when analyzing a spot where one could build a hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area. I think that these coordinates would be a good place for a hospital in San Francisco although I don’t really know much about earthquakes besides of course the basics which I used to the best of my ability to come up with these 6 factors that I used to make the justifications below. These are my reasons as to where we should put a hospital putting Liquefaction areas, accessibility, population density, seismic hazard zones, low ground shaking amplification, and cost efficiency into consideration and analyzation.

Liquefaction With where we chose for our location, liquefaction is a big factor. The different types of liquefaction are; settlement, ground oscillation, lateral spread, and flow failure. The two we were concerned about are settlement and flow failure because, being on a plateau, flow failure could occur and cause some form of landslide. Considering settlement occurs throughout every terrain, that was also taken into consideration. With liquefaction, there are ways to counteract it. We can compact the soil so it wont settle any further, or drain it by removing the ground water. Although both are not foolproof, it will help prevent most liquefaction that could occur.

Accessibility
We need to hospital to be accessible because if people couldn’t get to the hospital then there would be no need for the hospital at all. In where we planned to put our hospital, it is located near US 101 and there are a lot of other roads that lead to it. Accessibility is crucial when building a hospital because ambulances need to get in to help patients in dire need to get to the hospital. Also, the hospital is relatively in an area that will be an easy commute for patients that need to go to our hospital. When patients get there, because of the open area that we chose to build our hospital on, there will be enough space to build a reasonable sized parking lot for patients and family members of patients, or those with close relative/people associated with patients, to park and/or get dropped off by a city bus.

Population Density
The surrounding area where we chose to put the hospital is heavily populated by families and a community but the location itself has a lot of space to build. No buildings would need to be taken down, and no roads would have to be reconstructed. The area could be huge for the hospital and it wouldn’t affect anyone else physically, although the noise might be a bit much to bear. Other than that, building this hospital will be a breeze, after we get the license to build on what seems to be a state park, and it won’t affect any other buildings although we might need to level the mountain it sits on because it would not be good if our hospital was at an angle because all the doctors and patients would have a tough time staying upright and that could lead to failure during procedures and/or surgeries which could have very dangerous consequences like death or extreme injury to patient, suing from patient which would cost the hospital lots of money, and so forth.

Avoiding Seismic Hazard Zones Seismic hazard zones are areas that scientists have studied in which they estimate earthquake ground motions at the earths surface. We want to avoid seismic hazard zones because we do not want to be the center of an earthquake so we can avoid as much damage as possible and being at the center of an earthquake would not do us any good and trying to keep the hospital in contact because trying to keep the hospital in one piece is our main goal and to do so we need to avoid seismic hazard zones.

Low Ground Shaking