Thought to be one of the largest plastic structures ever assembled, the prototype for a federally funded disposable hospital has sprouted in Monroeville.

	Darrell Sapp/Post-Gazette
	A worker waits for more roofing panel to be lifted into place yesterday on a "disposable hospital" being built in a parking lot near the Westinghouse Energy Center in Monroeville. The structure is billed as a prototype for how the country could defend itself against bioterrorism or natural disasters. The large tubes on the backside of the "hospital" are part of the ventilation system.

Covering more than 5,000 square feet of parking lot behind the Westinghouse Energy Center, the floor, walls and some of the roof for the first Emergency Isolation and Treatment Shelter have been assembled during the past week.

Today, government officials will tour the facility, which is the model for a portable structure that could be quickly assembled and then taken apart as needed to treat victims of bioterrorism or a natural disaster.

Polymer composite panels that weigh about 30 pounds each and measure 1 meter square are the shelter's building blocks. The idea is that kits containing enough panels to build a 500-bed hospital could be stored around the country, and then shipped and assembled where needed. The hospital can be built within 72 hours.

Because it's made of plastic, the one-story facility would be all-weather and could be easily cleaned. Disposal would also be possible, although it's unclear that such action would be needed with known infectious agents.

The structure being assembled in Monroeville will have room for 150 beds. While planners believe they will be able to build a shelter of that size in only 12 hours, it has taken four days to partially assemble the prototype.

"This is absolutely a learning process," said Eric Poach, an emergency medical services specialist at Mercy Hospital and member of the Pennsylvania Region 13 Working Group, a regional counter-terrorism task force. Region 13, which coordinates activities in 13 southwestern Pennsylvania counties, is building the disposable hospital under a $750,000 federal contract.

Poach came up with the idea for the shelter two years ago after thinking about what would happen if patients suffering from an infectious disease -- whether from bioterrorism or an emerging illness such as severe acute respiratory syndrome -- converged on any one hospital. Not only would the influx tax the supply of beds and machinery at the facility, it could also challenge the hospital's finances and reputation if it came to be known as, say, the "SARS hospital" or the "anthrax hospital" and had to care for those patients for weeks.

The need for "surge capacity" was identified this month by the federal government's General Accounting Office as a challenge facing hospitals. The GAO's Aug. 6 report to Congress on hospital preparedness stated that government officials worry that "hospitals may not have the capacity to accept and treat a sudden, large increase in the number of patients, as might be seen in a bioterrorist attack."

Poach has been thinking along these lines since the Gulf War, when he was working with the U.S. Public Health Service to develop the emergency medical system in Saudi Arabia.

Not everyone agrees with his vision when they first hear it, Poach acknowledged. He credited members of the Region 13 group for being open-minded enough to learn about and then support his shelter project.

"Sometimes when you think so long about something, you're met with skepticism" when you tell other people your ideas, Poach said. "The good thing about Region 13 is, there are a lot of other people who think outside of the box."

Now, the federal government and corporations ranging from Daedalus Project Inc., a Virginia company that has built similar structures in developing countries, to AT&T are part of the project. Even the American Plastics Council is on board.

Rob Krebs, spokesman for the council, said of the shelter: "This brings plastics-intensive building to a new height."

The hospital contains a series of 25 interconnected rooms, each of which is about the size of a standard double hospital room. While each of those rooms would contain two beds in a permanent hospital, some beds could be bunked in the shelter.

Measuring about 100 feet in width and 60 feet deep, the shelter is composed of three front-to-back corridors and three crossing hallways, the intersections of which make four courtyards. Viewed from above, the building has the appearance of a "four" rolled on a die.

As for the architectural style?

"Call it new modern American anti-terrorist," Poach said.