RIVER BEND HOSPITAL

If River Bend is devastated, because it was built upon an active fault-line, just who will take the blame?

It certainly won’t be those who forced it through ….. in spite of the facts.

In California, it would have been a violation of law to build a hospital or school there!

See the youtube video of it   One would expect a hospital facility of this size to be found ONLY in a major metropolitan area.  

Granted, especially when one takes into consideration the staff, doctors, nurses, medical equipment, and the quality of the care, … it is one incredible hospital staffed with caring and exceptional professionals.   

And though this article is to expose the idiocy of building it where they did, one cannot deride the services it provides to the community!   Take a look at this site which depicts the size well.

However, here in Oregon, … from the California border, up to the Seattle area, we are expecting an 8.0 to a 9.5 (on the Richter Scale) SUBDUCTION quake …. and we’d just entered the window of expectation (300 – 500 years since the last major quake) when the hospital was built.

Yet, if it does fall / fail to remain standing, … and fully operational, … it will be at a time when that hospital is critically needed, … when there will be a massive number of critical injuries, but they didn’t care; their plans were made … they liked the location, the view for this state-of-the-art …. this diamond-in-the-rough hospital and they did as they pleased!

I testified (against building it at that location), in front of the Springfield City Counsel, … for all the good it did. 

Now we all have to live with it, and hope and pray that it doesn’t fall ….    It’s a “when”, not an “if” …. and the quake will hit; we just have to pray that it’s not in our or our children’s generations!

Not long before it was built, the State or Oregon was upgrading the bridges across the rivers here – including the I-5 bridge less than a mile (as the crow flies) downriver, (scroll out on this linked map, to see it correctly, but note the river is right alongside the hospital!), but that didn’t stop them; they’d had a firm design it to be “earthquake proof”, ….. or so they said.

It was built with “eminent domain” … in other words, the developers and the city took the land by force.  Others will possibly tell you different, but as I remember, the owners which built their home there, alongside the McKenzie River, …. built it by hand, built it themselves, the entire family …. and when the city and the developers wanted it, … they took it and the homeowners had no choice.

They should have been able to keep all their land, or at the very least, been adequately compensated for it.  I suspect that the land value is now, possibly over 10 times the value they were paid ….. possibly much more!

I don’t agree with the use of eminent domain except in the most necessary of cases!

This case was NOT needed – the city and the developers liked the view.   There’s much more to it than that – and I claim it was money – – – investment in surrounding land by speculators ? ? ?  –  part of which was the availability of land for the doctor’s offices, adjacent clinics, resedential facilities, etc.

I was assured I was the one irresponsibly raising a life-safety issue regarding their decision to build there — the developers and the city had their minds made up and most likely, the money had already changed hands in spite of my warnings!

I doubt very much the former land owners were happy with the price, nor were happy to lose their precious land, but then, ….. this is Eugene / Springfield Oregon, after all, …. where collectivism supersedes individual rights!