Kiowa County Memorial
First Critical Access Hospital (CAH) in the nation to achieve
LEED Platinum certification.
The final push is over; the final documents have been submitted and reviewed.
One of the overarching challenges was certifying a rural hospital under a LEED reference guide intended for urban commercial occupancies (such as office buildings). Some of those incongruities, combined with project conditions, provided opportunities for the project team to achieve credit compliance in unusual ways.
One example is stormwater runoff. According to the credit, stormwater runoff should be reduced by 25%, compared to the existing conditions. However, the site was a basin for a drainage area much larger than the site boundary, which experienced periodic flooding and had to be pumped dry.
The site design alleviated the flooding issue and increased soil permeability, but solving the flooding issue without resorting to pumping water off the site obviously meant increasing runoff. The project team demonstrated that, had the original flooding problem been solved prior to the hospital’s acquisition of the site, the project would have indeed reduced overall runoff by improving soil permeability and increasing on-site retention capability. The GBCI reviewer agreed that we had met the intent of the credit by improving the overall conditions.
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