Barricades and Surveyor Markings: The Rerouting of the Main Entrance Begins *Completed*

One summer day in 2015, surveyors stealthily arrived and parked their truck near the Medical Center entrance. The surveyors hauled out the tools of their trade: You’ve seen the tools–tripods, theodolites (transits), levels, flags, tape measures, etc. After a few hours of performing their geometric and trigonometric magic, which included spraying undecipherable markings on the asphalt bisecting the medians, they quickly and quietly loaded their gear into their white surveyors truck and blended into the outgoing traffic. Unfortunately, they failed to leave a survey marker cipher for the uninitiated who wanted to know why they came and the meaning of the strange looking markings? Would more markings be forthcoming? A few days later it was apparent something was up: Seemingly under the cover of darkness, red barricades appeared around two median islands: still no cipher book. Could it be that the dust and noise emanating from the corner of Anderson Street and Prospect Avenue was a harbinger of things (sooner rather than later) to come?

 A google map aerial view of the project site. One of the first items on the contractor’s “To Do” list was the demolition of the “Mary M” apartments (upper right). While the heavy equipment was in the throes of clearing the debris from the apartment site, surveyors began randomly marking and staking in and around the median on Medical Center Drive.

Overlooking the Medical Center entrance from a seventh-floor window. The “Mary M” apartments (upper center) were first to be razed to make way for the preliminary work to begin. The area north (left) of the Medical Center entrance would be the first to be cleared and upgraded to realign a new entrance for the new hospitals off of Prospect Avenue.

This google map aerial view of the Loma Linda University Medical Center construction site (circa April 2016) depicts where the initial work began. The strip at the right (east) from Medical Center Drive to Barton Road was cleared to reroute underground high voltage power lines from Barton Road to Prospect Avenue where the lines would continue parallel to Prospect Avenue to an underground vault near the Schuman Pavilion. Initially, all of the construction work centered north of Medical Center Drive to Prospect Avenue and from Anderson Street to the east and to the Shuman Pavilion to the west. All of this was necessary to make a new hospital entrance off of a newly widened Prospect Avenue.

The new hospital entrance as seen from camera 1 located on top of the Medical Center. The following photographs will illustrate the actions taken as the traffic patterns were maneuvered and rerouted as more and more space was required to complete the preliminary work. The patient visitor parking lot, located north of the Medical Center Drive, was the last usable space to be cleared.

The surveyor markings on the asphalt and the barricades were the first signs of possible construction activity. Note the boom of the excavator at the left edge of the security booth’s roof. The excavator is clearing the debris from the “Mary M” apartments.

Another view of the barricades as seen looking towards the Medical Center.