Located in Seattle’s SODO District, the experienced team at Howard S Wright, a Balfour Beatty Company, was tasked with retro-fitting a series of disparate warehouses built in 1930 into a field hospital for the City of Seattle. The existing sites were not connected to one another, so modular safety access systems needed to be designed and installed within an extremely abbreviated timeline. Work Safe Access was awarded the project and partnered with Howard S Wright Construction through the crisis, providing over 23 separate customized modular safety access solutions throughout the project. The access systems were a combination of catwalks, walkways, platforms, stairs, and ramps, complete with safety guardrails. The emergency status of the project required the design and implementation of the safety access systems to be built in quick waves. As Howard S Wright would retrofit a segment of one or more warehouses, Work Safe Access would assess, design, manufacture, and install access systems behind the HSW team projects. Work Safe Access designed custom solutions that provided connected walkways, steps and platforms with guardrails at access points around the perimeter of select buildings where emergency field hospital crew would need ingress and egress. Through the use of pre-fabricated, interchangeable design components, Work Safe Access was able to quickly manufacture, transport, and install as rapidly as was required for continual improvements over the course of the project.
