In the midst of the pandemic, Connecticut’s Hartford HealthCare expanded its facility with a new wing aimed at increasing its operating and recovery capacity for the growing community. The addition, constructed without interrupting patient care, includes an electrical infrastructure and low-voltage network provided by Custom Electric Inc., Manchester, Conn.
Expansion of the Hartford HealthCare Bliss wing brought 44,000 square feet of space for additional operating rooms, MRIs, intensive care units and recovery. It increased overall hospital capacity by 10%–18%, according to a statement by Bimal Patel, Hartford HealthCare president. The new addition also added 18 new critical care beds, five operating rooms, the 10-bay pre- and postrecovery area and diagnostic imaging services.
Custom Electric provides commercial, industrial and municipal electric construction and service for the Hartford area. The contractor was tasked with building all the electric and low-voltage for the $70 million addition as part of a design-bid-build contract for general contractor FIP Construction, said Thomas Adamson, Custom Electric’s vice president.
Hartford’s growing community
Hartford HealthCare is one of the largest hospital systems in Connecticut, with over 400 locations serving 185 towns and employing 33,000 workers. The Bliss Expansion Project was aimed at meeting the increasing need for medical services in the downtown Hartford area. The hospital is located in a densely built area, so expansion had to be strategic.
The five-story addition stands above an existing tunnel and substation and between existing buildings, driveways, a loading dock and a helipad. Before construction, the area was used as a courtyard space with a small gazebo for employees and visitors. The logistical challenges to building in this limited space were significant.

The addition has a ground floor and four stories above that link directly to the existing hospital. The ground floor houses the electrical and mechanical systems for the entire building. The hospital then installed holding bays and the MRI servicing on the first floor. Critical care rooms and pre- and postoperation bays and cardiac care fill the second and third floors. All operating rooms are on the top floor.
Custom Electric arrived on-site in August 2020.
The electrical contractor has a long working history with Hartford HealthCare, including providing voice, data and security for the hospital’s complex control systems and equipment. Recent work has also included the temperature control and sound systems and a BDA antenna system installation for cellphones.
The addition was initially priced at $1.4 million for the core and shell, but the budget eventually rose to $7.4 million as the electrical design developed for the fit-out portion.
“One of the greatest challenges was the footprint,” said Nick Marziale, Hartford Hospital’s director of engineering and facilities.
The available space featured ledge bedrock that prevented digging a full basement that would adjoin to the existing hospital’s vast tunnel system.
“It would have been nice to connect the new building to our existing basement tunnel,” Marziale said. But blasting through that ledge would have been cost prohibitive.
Additionally, instead of taking on the expense of connecting a new electric service from the street, which would make the addition’s service independent from the hospital, the project took a more innovative approach. The existing building’s 13.8-kV services were located directly under the footprint of the new addition. So, they decided to draw the addition’s power directly from that service.

“We decided to feed the equipment right from a manhole in the basement of the equipment room,” Marziale said.
The maintenance hole was once an outside service access.
As a result, “we didn’t have to tear everything out and relocate it, we actually built over the top of the existing distribution and then paralleled off of that distribution to get our power,” Adamson said.
For the first phase of the project, Custom Electric’s team linked the service through the basement to the different levels to accommodate new mechanical and electrical equipment. The contractor also installed two 750-kW Caterpillar generators for fail-safe power.
Custom Electric then fit out all four floors as part of the project’s second phase. Toward the end of the project, the construction crew cut the hospital wall to connect each floor with the new addition so patients and staff could walk directly through the hall from the original part of the hospital to the newly built structure.
The final stage of the project involved the low-voltage and related systems that power the operating rooms and other high-tech spaces. All three phases posed their own challenges, but the connection of the medical equipment and computers demanded particularly painstaking work.
“Healthcare work is unique and especially challenging when it comes to the critical and high-tech requirements for OR [operating room] power and networks,” Adamson said.
Electricians must consider the infrastructure for the operating rooms’ isolation panels and the wiring and conduits for the medical equipment used when the system goes live.
Close construction quarters
Because of the tight space within the building area, staging areas were nonexistent. The work site was surrounded by two active buildings where patients were being treated, and brownstone buildings enclosed the area on a third side. There was no space for parking vehicles, equipment or cable prior to installation, which meant Custom Electric conducted much of its construction at its prefab site.
On the fourth side was a loading dock where contractors could receive materials as needed. That flow of materials had to be coordinated down to the hour.

Equipment could be assembled and brought in a little at a time from the prefab shop. Those preassembled components included the individual head walls, which were installed where the patient beds required electrical services and outlets for medical equipment such as oxygen and nurse call systems. These prefitted pieces were installed everywhere that recovery and critical care beds are used.
The prefab work also included other in-wall rough work, including the lighting and lighting controls. The team built the feeder conduits and support racks at the prefab site and brought them to the work site according to the construction schedule. Workers created the transformer wiring and branch circuit cables and built the data rack assembly, and then the work was brought to the site as the project evolved.

The finished addition also includes state-of-the art, outdoor, colored LED lighting that can be adjusted with lighting controls.
Work continued through the pandemic
To prevent transmission of the coronavirus, the crews had to take precautions. Every employee was assigned a QR code, and as they arrived on-site, they entered a booth where they could scan the QR code and have their temperature taken, which then linked to their ID. They saw a green light when they were approved to enter the building, based on a normal temperature reading. They also practiced social distancing while working. Throughout the two-year project, there were only eight COVID cases among the construction crew.
Working on an active hospital provided other challenges, Adamson said. One example was the connection process between the addition and the existing facility.
“At that point we were actually going into patient spaces,” he said.
That meant construction noise had to be kept to a minimum, which is no small challenge when breaking through walls and cutting and removing concrete.
The typical construction issues also had to be taken into account, such as containing dust generated by sanding and painting from vulnerable patients and the public.
“We made patients aware when they might hear some noise and conducted the work at strategic times,” Marziale said. “We try to be respectful of our patients, of course.”
To coordinate for safety and accommodate the patients’ health and comfort, every morning the construction crews held meetings to address the challenges for that day and observations from the day before. In some cases, planning could require multiple meetings throughout the day.
When one task came upon a health risk, or just wasn’t going to work, “At times you’ve got to pivot and do something slightly different so that we’re not creating a problem,” Adamson said. “From an electrical standpoint, we do this kind of work all the time.”
Finished addition serves thousands yearly
Altogether, the project included the medium-voltage service, paralleling gear, MI cable, isolation power, uninterruptible power and generators. Custom Electric ran cable for all power, lighting, emergency lighting, temperature control, data, wireless access, nurse call, fire alarm, security, antenna, paging and medical gas wiring.
Throughout the two-year project, Custom Electric self-performed 99.9% of the subcontracted medium-voltage terminations. The work was accomplished with 175,000 man-hours, while Custom Electric’s total man-hours were 31,000.
At peak, Custom Electric had 27 electricians on-site, managed by three general foremen: Marcin Andrukiewicz handling the infrastructure, Dave Gambacorta overseeing the interior fit-out and Todd Hunter running the low-voltage crews. The project was completed in August 2022.

“We’ve been doing work at the hospital for 25 years, but to have this be such a major addition for the hospital, and having it be done during COVID, I think is the impressive thing for me,” Adamson said. “To me, the fact that we were able to get all this done with the material shortfalls, the manpower, that’s what I’m most proud of.”
The healthcare company’s next project involves a new substation for the whole hospital, bringing new feeders from local carrier Eversource, relocating the facility’s substation to a century-old brownstone building where the switchgear, transformers and related equipment will reside, with 23,000V capacity.
In the meantime, the addition is helping the hospital continue to serve patients. Since the work was completed, Marziale said there have been no major issues. That’s unusual for a new construction when systems often need some tweaking.
“So we’ve been very happy with that,” he said.
Header image: The new addition brought 44,000 square feet of patient service area to the hospital.
custom electric Inc.
About The Author
SWEDBERG is a freelance writer based in western Washington. She can be reached at [email protected].