New Quake-Proof Olive View Hospital Receives Its 1st Patients

In 1971, early on the morning of her birthday, Mikki Edwards, fresh out of nursing school, was in the surgical intensive-care unit at a new hospital in Sylmar called Olive View.

There was a rumble that Feb. 9, and the lights went out. For an instant, she thought it was a scheduled test of the emergency generator. But then “beams and girders started coming up through the carpeting,” Edwards said.

Saturday, after 16 years of nursing at the overcrowded “temporary” replacement for the county hospital that the earthquake destroyed on her birthday, Edwards was among dozens of staff members who helped move 92 patients to the new Olive View Medical Center, built on the same site.

The opening of the $120-million hospital, a technological tour de force designed to ride out earthquakes and incorporating the latest in medical equipment, had been delayed by an embarrassing, yearlong string of mechanical flaws and licensing glitches. And construction took nearly 10 years because of delays caused by shrinking state and county budgets.

Last-Minute Details

As late as Friday afternoon, according to state health officials, fire marshals were balking at minutiae such as untaped seams in some gypsum wallboard.

More than a dozen ambulances assembled before dawn Saturday at Olive View Mid-Valley Hospital in Van Nuys to transfer patients. The staff was eager to start, fearing another delay.

“We can’t go through this yo-yo anymore,” said Mari Anne Kainz, director of nursing, as she moved from ward to ward, checking on preparations. The transfer of patients had been practiced a week ago, she said. Now all that was needed was the final go-ahead.

For 16 years after the earthquake, Mid-Valley was the only place where thousands of the San Fernando Valley’s poor or uninsured could get medical care close to home. Its wards continually overflowed.

As an example of conditions, Dr. George Wittenstein, chief of surgery, who was on hand for the move, said Mid-Valley’s 2 1/2 operating rooms had handled 265 operations a month. Even at that pace, there was a two-month waiting list for elective surgery, he said.

In contrast, the new hospital has six operating rooms, with the equipment now for heart surgery and neurosurgery, he said. Until now, uninsured patients from the northern part of the county had to travel about an hour to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center for heart surgery.

In Mid-Valley, the emergency room was “an urban MASH unit,” Kainz said.

The eight beds of the old hospital’s intensive-care unit were crowded into a small L-shaped wing. Saturday, staff members were shoulder to shoulder in intensive care, trying to ready the patients for the move.

‘It’s Been Worth It’

Edwards, now head nurse in the pediatrics ward, oversaw staff members who were preparing four children, including two infants, for the transfer. “It’s been a wait, but it’s been worth it,” she said. “We’ll be one of the major hospitals for this area.”

Two hours after the move had been scheduled to begin, approval came through over the telephone at a temporary command post in Mid-Valley.

At 9:15 a.m., a slow but steady stream of ambulances, vans and buses began leaving the hospital. The first patients to be moved were the most critical cases, starting with Anni Zemanian.

Zemanian had been admitted to the intensive-care unit after suffering a heart attack and, because she was recovering well, had been moved to a regular room. But Saturday morning, just after breakfast, she suffered what appeared to be a serious stroke, said Dr. Duane Schul, Mid-Valley’s chief resident.

Like the other seriously ill patients, Zemanian was accompanied in her ambulance by a senior staff physician. A neurologist followed so that he could perform a scan of her brain when she arrived in Sylmar.

Administrators had hoped that Mid-Valley’s intensive-care unit would not be full, thus easing slightly the difficult job of transferring such patients. But that was not to be.

There was an elderly patient with congestive heart failure who could breathe only with a mechanical respirator. Two others were in the throes of kidney failure, complicated by other problems. Another had just had chest surgery and had two tubes draining fluid from the lungs. Eight in all, each requiring continuous care.

Arriving at Sylmar, these patients were taken into one of five intensive-care units, each one large enough to swallow up the single unit at the old hospital. The widely spaced beds, each surrounded by an array of life-support equipment, are all visible from a nursing station across the broad room.

One by one, the ambulances pulled up to Mid-Valley, and patients were loaded. After the seriously ill group came 15 patients recovering from surgery and the children from the pediatrics ward.

At the back of the main Mid-Valley building, a pink school bus was loaded with the first batch of psychiatric inpatients; 29 were eventually moved. Each received a round of applause from the staff as he or she nervously left the hospital. Another 21 were transported from a temporary unit at County-USC Medical Center.

By 1:10 p.m., everyone had been safely transferred.

The first patient to be admitted at the new Olive View was one of four who walked into its expansive emergency room at 8 a.m. A little later, the waiting room contained a dozen people, seated amid a forest of balloons.

Scanning the growing crowd, John Gordon, an assistant administrator who for weeks had seen nothing but empty hallways, said: “It’s starting to look like a hospital.”