Guam Memorial Hospital is located in Tamuning. Photo courtesy of Guampedia. Like an inherited disease, the problem of a new hospital for Guam has been passed down from generation to generation.
And perhaps the island is suffering from collective amnesia since the same ideas and locations for a new hospital repeatedly surface.
In past decades, various administrations and task forces considered rehabilitating the Guam Memorial Hospital. Those discussions continued despite all evidence that the facility had so many challenges that however radical the surgery the patient was unlikely to recover.
Nevertheless, reports were commissioned — and then disappeared and couldn’t be found.
Thomas P. Camacho, principal of Duenas, Camacho & Associates; told the Journal in 2019 he was at GK2 Inc. when that company and associates from other companies surveyed the hospital in the late 1990s. “The report was focused on the feasibility of vertical expansion,” he said.
The GK2 survey was given to GMH, he said.
In 2017, the GMHA Business Sustainability Plan proposed bond borrowing for funding $125 million worth of repairs to the hospital.
See “A spoonful of sugar: GMH patches and makes do while it waits,” in the Aug. 19, 2019, issue of the Journal.
Discussions on keeping GMH as a viable alternative were still discussed when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assessed the hospital in November 2019. But the Army Corps of Engineers recommended Guam build a replacement hospital for about $743 million instead of spending $761 million to renovate GMH.
Camacho told the Journal in 2019 that the current building would not meet code and the huge amount of finance required to retrofit it would likely make the idea unfeasible.
The main building was built to allow for damage, he said, but is now inadequate. You always expect damages, but over the years of continual movement — if you don’t see it, you don’t repair it — it could get worse and worse and worse.”
On-island, Camacho said, “We have the ability to design, plan and build these facilities. GMH has done a good job of trying to keep what we have and service the people,” he said. “We just have to be careful about who is planning and who is doing the design for the hospital because there are firms out there that will give you ‘pie in the sky’ plans, and really what it amounts to is designing a proper facility.” A practical sense of island conditions is important, he said. “Anything built along the shoreline is going to be more susceptible to environmental — the challenges of corrosion.”
Locations currently in discussion include Ypao Point, with Sen. D. Chris Barnett’s Bill 185-37 to site it there, supported by some of the medical community. The argument is if the hospital was sited at Ypao Point, there would be no need for a medical campus, since many doctors have clinics nearby.
After the Eagle’s Field location in Mangilao ran into issues with approval and timing of its federal land lease, and more, Leon Guerrero now favors Barrigada, and a medical campus on 102 acres, to be expedited through her Bill 184-37.
On Nov. 20, the governor’s office released a letter from the Guam Economic Development Authority’s bond counsel, that construction on a fault line would require disclosure to potential investors, which would, in turn, make marketing bonds “extremely difficult.”
The Governor’s office is correct that the Guam Memorial Hospital sits on a major fault line, with much of the surrounding area in the same fault zone.
A little-seen report, Seismic Hazard Vulnerability on Guam, recommended not building on fault lines, according to Sept. 8, 2003 story in the Journal, “Hospital straddles dangerous ground;
shocking report reveals earthquake fault zones.”
Ypao headland in Tamuning is in what the report terms “a prominent fault zone that strikes northwest southeast through NCTAM Sand Double Reef on the northwest coast.”
The Guam Seismic Advisory Council, which commissioned the study, worked to introduce Public Law 23-88, which changed Guam’s Uniform Building Code Earthquake Seismic Zone 3 upwards to Seismic Zone 4 on April 29, 1996. The council also proposed a seismic network to monitor fault lines on Guam.
Dr. George P. Macris, who in September 2003 was incoming medical director at GMH obtained the report on June 24, 2003 from Guam’s Office of Civil Defense, after hearing of its existence there. Macris took the report to William I. McMillan, CEO and administrator of GMH.
Seismic Hazard Vulnerability on Guam, a Summary was published in March 1998. The Water and Energy Research Institute of the Western Pacific at the University of Guam issued the summary but kept no copies. The report was “a simplified summary” of an earlier report prepared by Dames & Moore Inc., which was submitted in December 1994 to the Civil Defense/Emergency Services Office of the Government of Guam.
McMillan said the hospital did not have a copy of the report, but he did say of the hospital, “It’s been shaken through earthquakes so many times, the expansion joints are broken.” Macris told the Journal his concerns were about the physical vulnerability of the hospital, its patients, visitors and staff. “If we should suffer a major seismic event, we would not have the facility to deal with casualties.”
Lateral motion at the hospital had been so severe during an earthquake, Macris said, that staff fell down.
The discussion on whether the hospital would be a public-private hospital, or privately run continued to surface through the years also.
A public-private partnership for the hospital could obviate the need for bond funding.
In 2021, Gov. Lourdes A. Leon Guerrero mused on the idea of private sector involvement, at a press conference after a trip to the U.S. mainland when she discussed using federal funding to build a hospital.
“I don’t know if Guam still needs a government-run hospital, but Guam definitely needs a new public hospital,” the governor said. “Should it be run by the government? That’s a discussion I’m willing to have,” she said. mbj
