After more than a year of delays, American and German officials heaved the first shovels of dirt Friday to mark the symbolic start of construction on a nearly billion-dollar U.S. military hospital here. Expected to open in 2022, the new facility will replace the Army’s aging Landstuhl Regional Medical Center and the Air Force’s medical clinic at Ramstein Air Base, both of which were built in the 1950s and cost millions of dollars a year to maintain. Built during the Cold War, the rambling spine-and-rib structure was designed to minimize casualties from Soviet bombs. That design makes it difficult and time-consuming to navigate. Most patient rooms, built for the massive numbers of casualties expected from Soviet battles that never happened, look out on other parts of the hospital. Landstuhl has handled thousands of wounded from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as casualties from the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on Benghazi, Libya. LRMC treated the victims of the USS Cole bombing in October 2000. The hospital has also played a integral part in the repatriation of the three American soldiers who were taken prisoners of war in Yugoslavia in March 1999, and treated American and Kenyan victims of the U.S. Embassy bombing in Nairobi in August 1998. In 1994, it served as the treatment point for hundreds of Bosnian refugees injured in the Sarajevo marketplace bombing, as well as treating victims of the 1988 Ramstein Air Show disaster, and the victims of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps Barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. During Operations Desert Shield and Storm in 1990/1991, more than 4,000 service members from that region were treated at the facility, and more than 800 U.S. Military personnel deployed to Somalia were evacuated and treated here. It remains the U.S. military’s premier overseas trauma center. stripes/news/officials-break-ground-on-hospital-to-replace-landstuhl-1.310376
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 19:58:29 +0000
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