The clock is ticking

Vols stadium project to be finished by home opener

By Candy McCampbell

The clock is running on Johnson & Galyon Inc. of Knoxville, which has four jobs under way at the University of Tennessee's Neyland Stadium and a short timeline to finish them.

Work on the $24 million in projects began after the football season ended in December and will be completed for the Vols' season opener Sept. 2.

In fact, Bill Gardner, project manager for Johnson & Galyon, general contractor on the project, is eyeing an early August completion.

"We worked seven days a week for a while," he said. Six-day weeks are now the norm.

The contract calls for:

• Construction of a new club level with more than 400 seats.
• Widening of concourses on the north and east sides.
• Building new restrooms and concession stands on the concourses.
• A major update of the utilities infrastructure.

The work is part of a long-term, $110 million stadium renovation that also will add more elevators, change entry ramps and install a new brick façade to give the stadium exterior the same look as existing buildings on the Knoxville campus.

"Every piece of steel had to be field-measured," Gardner said.

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The measuring took time but paid off later, said Ed McDougle, principal at Ross Bryan Associates Inc., a Nashville consulting engineering firm that is a joint venture design team partner with McCarty Holsaple McCarty Inc., a Knoxville architectural firm.

"The work has been performed in many stages," McDougle said.

The club level is sandwiched between the upper deck and skyboxes on the east side. The deck was strengthened in 2001 to handle the extra weight with the addition of the skyboxes. The Ross Bryan team got the drawings and checked the new, projected loads on a computer model.

"The new columns of the upper deck had enough capacity," McDougle said. "That was the easy part."

A few cutaways in the skybox exterior panels allowed access to the steel frame so support braces could be added under the skyboxes.

"We had not originally planned to create computer models of the old structure, but we had to bite the bullet (since old drawings could not be located)," he said. In fact, about 40 percent of the stadium is now on the firm's computers.

"We had to make sure the beams and column sizes matched" and spent several days getting the measurements, McDougle added. "It has gone together with fewer problems than some new jobs."

The four rows of club seating, with 414 seats, are replacing 13 rows of stadium seating with 1,704 seats. The renovation will cut stadium seating capacity from 104,079 to about 101,000 when complete, though the final seat count for the entire project has not yet been set, said Scott Webb, architect and construction administrator at McCarty Holsaple McCarty.

The new club seats, with a $25,000 one-time fee and a $4,000 annual fee, will help fund the renovation. The seats are all outdoors and are protected by an aluminum "eyebrow" roof stretching the length of the 240-ft. club level.

Behind the seats are large, open rooms for food service, televisions and seating, protected by full-length glass walls. The back is floor-to-ceiling, 1-in.-thick double-pane windows overlooking the Tennessee River "to provide a view and to continue the overall design vocabulary established by the skyboxes above," Webb said.

Demolition work was critical from both time and space standpoints, Gardner said. The old steel had to be exposed so new steel could be added, and getting to the steel required the use of small lifts, scaffolding and knuckle booms, he added.

A massive scaffold, constructed on the back side of the skyboxes, hangs out over Estabrook Hall, a classroom building, so it was covered with fabric sides to prevent material from falling below.

"We had to be aware of the students at all times," Gardner said. Classes for the more than 26,000 UT-Knoxville students have been in session during most of the time since the job started.

A pair of stair towers that came down had to be ripped out from the inside and braced from the inside, Gardner said.

Steel was hauled up with a crane and some building materials were loaded on to existing elevators to get to the new club level.

Concrete, however, was pumped up in two stages: to a bin on the concourse, then through a 2-in.-diameter pipe to the club level and a 3-in. pipe over the form to the club seats. The job took about 1,000 cu. yds. of concrete.

Down below, parts of concourses on the east and north sides are being enlarged from 30 to 90 ft. wide. This larger "pad" also holds the new, bigger concrete block restrooms and expanded concession stands.

More than 36,000 special-color and -shaped architectural block and more than 40,000 regular CMU block are being used, according to Ed Goan with Shoun-Allen Masonry Inc. of Morristown, Tenn.

Included in the "below decks" area is a new concrete block building housing the stadium's JumboTron electronic controls.

Utilities to serve the 75-year-old stadium are also being upgraded.

Almost 500,000 ft., or 94 mi., of power and low-voltage cable and 200,000 ft., or 38 mi., of conduit are being added, said Tony Stanley, project manager for Advent Electric Inc. of Knoxville.

The electrical improvements involved some 24-hour electrical shutdowns involving 10 other buildings, which had to be planned and coordinated with temporary provisions for alternate power, Gardner said.

The water lines to the main feeder just outside the stadium are being increased from 4-in. to 6-in. diameter.

Laydown space is virtually nonexistent because the stadium is surrounded by other buildings, so deliveries are on an as-needed basis.