Long Beach Cancer Center

Type: Outpatient Medical Office Building

Building Method: Type 5, wood frame, stud and stucco, poured in place concrete

The Long Beach Cancer Center is a commercial / medical office project located in Long Beach, CA., near the Long Beach Community Hospital. The building consists of two separate types of buildings. The Medical Office portion of the building that serves doctors and out-patients is a type 5 building consisting of a slab on grade with continuous spread footings, wood stud framed walls with sheetrock on the inside and plaster on the outside with full thick insulation. The roof is a wood truss structure with mission clay tile roofing. The interior improvements include typical medical office amenities including carpeted flooring, decorative designs and T-bar drop ceiling with fluorescent lighting. The linear accelerator portion of the building is constructed like a bank vault… but on steroids!!. Since the Linear accelerator shoots out a beam of high energy particles to bombard cancer tumors the walls of the vault must be very thick in order to contain the particle beam once it passes through the patient’s cancer tumor. In order to stop relatively low energy reflective radiation the walls and roof of the vault are 36” thick reinforced concrete. The target wall of the vault that must stop the direct particle beam from passing through the vault is six feet thick and has a 10” thick solid steel plate embedded in the middle of the wall. The exterior of the vault is made to look very similar to the office portion of the building with plaster and a mission tile roof. The project includes a parking lot for patient’s cars and street frontage landscaping and irrigation.