Orchard Park, N.Y. (WBEN) - Through the first six-plus months of construction for a new state-of-the-art football stadium along Abbott Road in Orchard Park, crews have completed much of the major excavation for the future home of the Buffalo Bills come the 2026 season.
Currently on site of the stadium construction, people can see steel piles that are being driven into the bedrock, as well as precast panels that are allowing for the safety of workers inside the pit. All of this is in preparation for start of structural steel being erected come the end of January, beginning of February.
"That's a pretty significant project milestone to get started," said John Polka, vice president of stadium development in an interview with WBEN. "We'll take a few months while steel is being set within the excavation, then eventually fans will be able to see the structure really rise up out of the ground, which will be an exciting point for the project, for sure."
Related
As of this time, Polka says everything continues to remain on schedule for construction that was originally set out earlier this past summer.
Despite the upcoming end of the football season providing a chance for the area around the stadium to breathe a bit, Polka says the football season, itself, doesn't really impact construction in Orchard Park.
"[The] spring and summer months, just in terms of productivity on site and better weather, is great. Football season has a minimal impact right now on the overall construction project, but certainly as we get into spring and summer, that'll help us out on site," he said.
To this point of the stadium construction progress, Polka says the weather has worked very much in favor of crews getting ready to start with, now, building from the ground-up. He says if the weather this winter continues to stay more milder with not so much precipitation hindering progress, it's possible for crews to get ahead of schedule with construction.
"Generally, I would say though, the way the schedule is built is for a certain duration. What the weather does is it impact that and forces us to make up time," Polka explained. "If the weather stays favorable, really all that we'll have to do or won't have to do is make up time on the construction. It's possible there's a little schedule pick up, but the reality is in Western New York, we can have another weather event or something else that creates a hiccup on site. So generally speaking, there's no real acceleration, just the ability to not have to make up time as we go on. But certainly, the weather being as good as it has been, and hopefully continuing that way through the winter, is much appreciated."
Over the coming months of stadium construction right up until opening in 2026, Polka says the design of certain elements of the overall project may continue to be evaluated and tweaked. However, the design of the stadium, itself, is going to remain the same.
"The majority of the stadium, the renderings that people are seeing, the overall look and feel of the stadium is pretty well set at this point," Polka said. "There are going to be some things we tweak and things we realize, or, quite frankly, things that change within our industry that force us to go back and reevaluate. But generally speaking, the design of the stadium you're seeing is the stadium that we're building."
Next week Sunday may be the final chance for many Bills fans to get a look at the new stadium site in its current state as a massive hole in the ground. Following the team's New Year's Eve matchup with the New England Patriots, it remains uncertain whether or not Buffalo will host a playoff game in Western New York.
So what can fans expect to see of the new stadium site when fans return to Orchard Park come kickoff for the 2024 season? Polka says the biggest change for fans will be a structure actually starting to come up out of the ground.
"We refer to the exterior as the skin of the building, I'm not sure as the start of the football season approaches that there will be much of the skin on the building. But the steel - the exoskeleton, as we refer to it - is what folks are going to see, and that's, I think, really exciting," he said. "And throughout the course of the next football season, there will be noticeable progress from week-to-week as the season progresses. There's been a lot of progress this season, but a lot of that progress has been down below grade, where you're not really witnessing it. Next season, I think fans will actually see a lot of progress from week-to-week as they come out for home games."