A rendering shows the expansion project at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria.

Columbia Memorial Hospital has been selected as a finalist for a $13.9 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to construct a resilient structure as part of the hospital’s planned expansion.

The hospital was one of five applicants in Oregon selected to receive further consideration for funding from FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant. Nationwide, FEMA selected 124 projects for funding in an amount totaling $1.8 billion.

Columbia Memorial announced a major expansion in February and has since unveiled details about the project’s focus on resilience and disaster preparedness.

Erik Thorsen, the CEO of Columbia Memorial, explained that the funding from FEMA will support features that will help the new building weather risk from natural disasters. The Astoria hospital off Exchange Street is in a tsunami inundation zone.

The four-story building will be constructed on a deep pile foundation system in order to withstand earthquakes, and the in-patient population — the most vulnerable in the hospital’s care — will be housed on the third floor so that patients would not have to evacuate in a tsunami or other natural disaster.

The third floor will also feature a safe refuge area that could house up to 1,900 people in an emergency. Critical infrastructure, such as electrical systems and generators, will be located on the fourth floor.

“(Housing infrastructure on the fourth floor) would hopefully allow our facility to continue to operate during any sort of natural disaster,” Thorsen said. “And also on the fourth floor is the location of our helipad, so if we did need to evacuate people out of the safe refuge area or a patient off of the third floor, we would be able to do that on the fourth floor by a helicopter. This grant helps pay for all of the costs associated with those resilience measures.”

The expansion has a projected cost of $175 million, up to $40 million of which is expected to come from fundraising and grants such as the FEMA award.

Mark Kujala, the executive director of the hospital foundation, credited support from elected officials for the project’s success in securing grant funding. U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley and U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, as well as U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici and representatives in the state Legislature, all wrote letters in support of the hospital’s expansion project.

“I think (the letters of support) really helped us show that there’s such broad support for what we are doing here,” Kujala said. “And I think the FEMA review team took that into account when they made their selections.”