Vermont’s Great Experiment

The new hospital started life as the Champlain Valley Exposition Center, three buildings amounting to 74,000 square feet, not too far from I-89 and accessible from a number of other hospitals off the highway. This had been a place for kids’ soccer and lacrosse games, antique expos and quilt shows and Tuesday bingo with a full snack bar. When Tatro went to visit the space with the lead civil engineer, Major Jason Villemaire, earlier this month, he had a hard time seeing the potential in all the emptiness. “I’m walking through these rooms … they’re like big empty spaces,” Tatro told me. “Major Villemaire is telling me what needs to happen, and I’m like, ‘It can’t happen. It can’t happen at all.’”

Villemaire put together the blueprints himself on Wednesday, April 1, working late into the night over pizza with a team of about seven other people. You can’t just put 400 beds in an expo center. Medical planners were asking Villemaire’s team to transform it into a space with eight 50-bed pods including an isolation ward, in case it had to take coronavirus patients. Each pod was to include a nursing station and supply closet as well as a sink, each bed to get its own electrical outlets and lamp nearby. Lieutenant Colonel Chris Gookin, the deputy state surgeon in the Vermont National Guard, recalls walking through the expo center before construction started and worrying about how everything would fit. “We’re having that moment of doubt where we’re like, ‘It’s not going to be big enough,’” he told me. He was imagining filling it up with two-by-fours, nursing units, sinks, beds, emergency exits, and corridors.

Villemaire wasn’t as worried. As a full-time engineer at the Burlington Air National Guard Base, he manages the infrastructure for a facility that hosts 15 F-35 fighter jets. He’d enlisted as an air mechanic in the late 1980s, and had experience building things quickly with few resources on deployments. But the scale of this project was altogether new to him..

“I’ve never done anything of this scope all at the same time,” he told me. And normally, for a project this big, it would take more than a week just to get all the personnel in place. “We were able to do it in a matter of hours.”

The advantage of the expo center was that it already had its own power, plumbing, heating, and ventilation. Still, Villamaire’s team needed to put up dozens of walls to separate each pod from the others and to divide each into two sections, for men and women; run new electrical wiring within the walls to get power next to each bed; and run plumbing to the sinks in the nurse’s stations. This would mean erecting close to a mile’s worth of walls eight feet high, a similar length of new electrical wiring to connect to 432 different power outlets, and about 1,200 feet of plumbing.