The new trailer is expected to enjoy a possibly year-long residence at NYU as the hospital considers what to do about a permanent MRI. In the meantime, the hospital is constructing a temporary shelter in the courtyard grounds where patients can wait before boarding the trailer for their scans.

One of the main challenges of storing the new MRI trailer to this new home, though, is its weight. At more than 65,000 pounds, the trailer poses a threat to structurally weaker areas of the courtyard and the basement department that sits directly below it.


To ensure the trailer wouldn't overload any point during its drive in, staff with J.C. Duggan, a rigging company, covered most of the courtyard with a timber mattress made of 12-foot long wooden beams bolted together. These beams help disperse the weight evenly as the truck rides over it. The company also laid out 65 metal sheets, one and a half inches thick, over the area to give better traction to the vehicle.

"Its' all dirt and we've gotten a lot of rain in the last week or so," John Cereghino, vice president of Brooklyn-based J.C. Duggan, explains. "It was very wet mud, so we were afraid of getting the trailer stuck."

When the MRI trailer arrives, it has to tread slowly and circuitously. In the courtyard, it drives up a ramp, rambles over the vast wooden mattress, and comes to a halt maybe 60 or 70 feet from the entrance. Then it jackknifes in reverse to reach the spot next to the under-construction patient shelter. To safely escort it to this spot, crews have to disassemble parts of the wooden mattress near the entrance that the trailer already drove over and then reassemble them in the new location the trailer is headed to.

It's a lot of work. Looking at what has to be done for the installation -- not just moving the trailer into place but also plugging it into the hospital's power system and getting it ready for inspections -- one crewman shakes his head.

"We're gonna have to dig deep," he says.

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