Bush Opens New Chapter for Hospital
Ground Broken in Bethesda for Facility to Replace Aging Walter Reed Center

By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 4, 2008

President Bush broke ground on a $1 billion expansion of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda yesterday, a project that will elevate the campus into what federal officials say will be the nation's premier military medical site and a destination for wounded service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, set to open by 2011, will supplant the aging Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the District, which is scheduled to close. The scale and cost of the project has grown in proportion to concern for conditions at Walter Reed, documented last year in a Washington Post series. The District facility has been strained by the volume of casualties returning from the Middle East.

Bush stood yesterday in the shadow of the hospital's landmark tower, built according to a design by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the building at a ceremony in 1940, voicing hope that the "striking" architectural style would meet approval. The tower will be preserved.

Bush addressed an audience including several dozen injured service members.

"At this new center, the Americans who fight for our freedom will get the compassion and support they deserve," Bush said.

The expanded facility will house a 345-bed medical center outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment and services to treat brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder, common maladies among troops returning from Iraq, and to rehabilitate amputees.

"In many fields, you are far ahead of civilian medicine," Bush said at a morning ceremony. "And when Bethesda and Walter Reed merge into one campus across from the National Institutes of Health, this will be the site of many more promising breakthroughs that will benefit not only our troops, but all mankind."

Replacing Walter Reed with an expanded Bethesda campus was a decision approved in 2005 by a Pentagon commission charged with base realignment and closure, known as BRAC. It is part of a larger $2 billion undertaking that includes construction of an Army hospital at Fort Belvoir.

The new military hospital will sit across Rockville Pike from NIH, a remarkable concentration of medical knowledge -- and traffic. With an additional 2,500 workers and double the current daily visitors, the medical center is expected to strain already congested roadways.

Cars already back up along the pike and two major cross streets near the hospital, Jones Bridge Road and Cedar Lane, said Ilaya Rome Hopkins, president of the East Bethesda Citizens Association. Gridlock sends cars onto residential streets such as Chelsea Lane at a rate of more than 500 cars over a two-hour evening rush, she said.

"This is not a problem that's created by BRAC, but it will be exacerbated by BRAC," she said.

Maryland has budgeted $43 million to improve traffic flow at four of the most congested intersections, said Phil Alperson, BRAC coordinator under Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D).

There has been debate over what, if any, of the traffic burden should fall to the military. County officials hope the Pentagon will pay for a new Metro entrance on the east side of Rockville Pike. Metro riders now exit the Medical Center Station of the Red Line across the street at NIH. That work, plus a new turn lane for vehicles, will cost at least $21 million, Alperson said.

"There are costs that should be picked up by the Defense Department," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who attended the ceremony.

The new center will pool the resources of the Army, Navy and Air Force. Service members said the consolidation will eliminate the need for families to travel between Bethesda and the District to see specialists.

"In the past, I've definitely had to go from Walter Reed to Bethesda to Walter Reed to Bethesda," said Army Sgt. Eric Ortegren, who returned from Afghanistan with a traumatic brain injury and PTSD. "And bringing the two together will definitely make a difference."

Ortegren said he prefers the environment at Bethesda, where services are spread across a larger and somewhat more orderly campus. The prospect of a new facility will raise spirits across the armed services, he said.

"Today soldiers are coming back with quite a lot more emotional damage than we had in the past," he said. "And knowing they're custom-designing a facility to take care of soldiers with those specific needs, that's a huge relief."

Staff researcher Alice R. Crites contributed to this report.