Hospital Plans to Eliminate Top 6 Floors : Panorama City: The renovation is meant to bring Kaiser Permanente up to modern earthquake safety standards. No beds will be lost.

Kaiser Foundation’s distinctive, binocular-shaped hospital building in Panorama City will more closely resemble opera glasses after the giant medical corporation knocks off the top six floors in a major renovation.

Removal of more than half of the nine-story building will be done as part of an effort to bring the facility up to modern standards of earthquake safety, Kaiser officials said this week.

Kaiser Permanente Hospital will replace the upper floors of the facility with a new medical tower designed to stand up to a very strong earthquake and remain fully operational, hospital Administrator Bruce Behnke said.

“The technology in earthquake-safe construction has advanced since the old building was built” about 1962, Behnke said. “We want to be as safe as possible.”

Officials conceded that chopping the top off the building is unusual. “It’s only been done one other time, with one other hospital,” Kaiser spokeswoman Karen Large said.

The alternative to removing the upper stories involved strengthening the existing building, but that would cost more than constructing an entirely new 10-story building, said Jeff Lambert, land-use coordinator for Kaiser’s Southern California region.

Kaiser officials have insisted that the present facility is not unsafe. “We have a clean bill of health” on the building from state and hospital industry safety inspectors, Behnke said, adding that the decision to make the renovation is purely a voluntary one.

Lambert said there is no question that the existing building would survive a strong earthquake. He said the concern was over whether it could remain operational afterward without incurring a loss of power or other services that would force the facility to close.

In the 1971 Sylmar quake, some hospitals in the area near the epicenter lost power and Kaiser officials said they don’t want that to happen to them.

The basement and the bottom three above-ground floors of the 325-bed facility are housed in a standard rectangular shape, and will be preserved. But the top floors are split into two attached circular towers, which will be removed.

Inside, the medical wards are round, which some staff members have complained is an inefficient use of space, Behnke said. There also have been complaints that the shape increases noise levels, Assistant Administrator Tracy Schmidt said.

Behnke said construction of the new tower will begin in two years. There is no firm cost estimate because the renovation was only recently approved by corporate executives, he said, but the cost of removing the upper structures will be more than $1 million.

Behnke said earthquake safety was “one of many factors” involved in making the decision to renovate the hospital. But Lambert said earthquake safety concerns were a major reason for the renovation.

As for the loss of hospital beds in the existing structure, Behnke said the new building will contain just as many beds as will be lost through removal of the two towers. He also said there is no need for more beds than now exist at the hospital.

In the wake of rising medical costs, hospital stays have become shorter, Behnke said. Consequently, he said, at any one time there are many vacant beds in the hospital. On March 23, for instance, the hospital housed 206 patients, which left more than one-third of the beds empty.