Design for Continued Functionality of the Adana City Hospital, a Rescue Hub Following the 2023 Turkey-Syria Earthquakes

During the devastating 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake sequence, hospital functionality in the affected provinces was considerably reduced to approximately 30–70% capacity due to collapsed or heavily damaged healthcare facilities, as well as significant nonstructural damage to lightly or moderately damaged facilities. The Adana City Hospital, the world’s second largest seismically isolated medical facility and one of the largest trauma centers in the region, was located in one of 11 heavily-hit provinces. While older buildings, as well as other modern hospital facilities – including select seismically isolated hospitals – typically designed for collapse prevention or life safety performance goals, lost functionality or operated at reduced capacity, the large, 1,550-bed Adana hospital successfully withstood the disaster with no structural or nonstructural damage and retained 100% functionality. The present paper presents the main design criteria and stringent seismic response limits used for the design of the structure and isolation system, which consisted of 1,512 Triple Pendulum™ isolators engineered by Earthquake Protection Systems, Inc., to deliver continued post-earthquake functionality of the facility, in accordance with the Seismic Isolator Standard (SIS). The early activation of the Triple Pendulum™ isolation system and special design features effectively enabled an estimated 75% reduction in seismic base shear demands on the supported structure and successfully protected its structural and architectural components, medical equipment, and MEP installations. Potential design and construction issues in other seismically isolated hospitals that did not exhibit the target performance of the facility or the isolation system they were designed for is also briefly mentioned.