Orchard Park, N.Y. (WBEN) - It has been nearly two months since construction crews were given the green light to commence work on building a new state-of-the-art football stadium for the Buffalo Bills in Orchard Park.
After weeks of preliminary prep work to ready the site along Abbott Road for major construction, excavation work for the project is officially underway.
"We're starting to finish up some of the early work, the prep. The site fence has been established to secure the perimeter, we're working on temporary power and other utility relocations and establishing some utilities to be used during the construction project," said John Polka, Vice President of Stadium Development with the Bills. "As most people can see as they're driving by, we're underway with mass excavation of the work around the property and in the stadium bowl."
LISTEN LIVE TO WBEN:
This past Friday saw construction crews conduct a test blast on site of the new stadium with the blasting phase of excavating set to commence over the next five weeks. The preliminary plan is for crews to conduct three blasts per-week over that timeframe, but as Polka says, there are factors in play that could alter the timeline.
"It's obviously dependent on how the productivity goes, what the weather does," he said. "Right now, we're planning for the end of August, beginning of September to be the end of any of the detinations on site. At that point, we should be down to the bottom of the field level."
The mass excavation taking place right now is making sure to get down to the bedrock, and then the blasting - also referred as controlled detonations - is a thorough and involved process that avoids having to rip up the rock too much in the process.
"They'll go around, they'll drill holes into the rock to prep. They'll also do a little bit of pre-splitting so when the detonation does go off, it has a better opportunity to break apart the rock that's there. After the holes are done and the pre-splitting is done, that's when the detonation comes in," Polka explained. "They'll use that to break apart the rock and make it easier for the excavation to continue to get down."
Related
The Bills have been doing their job by communicating with residents that are within range of the blast area, ensuring they are aware of what is happening and what to expect in the coming weeks.
"We've been getting letters from the Bills. In the beginning, it was almost every week talking about the process and stuff that was happening," said Eric "The Hammer" Matwijow, owner of "Hammer's Lot" on Abbott Road adjacent to the construction site. "There was a company that came around and was taking pictures and stuff, just in case there was any damage due to the explosions and stuff. Basically even doing your driveway and the sidewalks, around the windows, foundation, any existing cracks. I mean, they took a lot of pictures on every building."
As Polka explains, the firm taking these photos and conducting these evaluations and surveys are part of the contractual obligations from the contractor.
"It's a visual, it could be just outside, if they wanted. If they were comfortable with the company coming in, they would do an interior inspection of their foundation walls, just so before any of this activity occurred, there would be a record of that so if there was a problem with a neighboring house after the fact, there would be documented information that there wasn't a problem before and there was a problem afterwards," he detailed.
Polka adds quite a few of the neighbors close to the site took up on that service and had the surveys completed.
While some have worried about the blasts from crews affecting their homes, some are also concerned about Highmark Stadium and what they might do to potentially affect the 50-year-old facility. Polka says the existing stadium does fall in that same perimeter as some of the neighboring properties.
"A little bit of a survey has been completed on that to make sure we understand if there's anything that arises from this, but there are also monitors around the perimeter of the site that provide information after each detonation to make sure that any detonation is well within the levels that are acceptable. Nothing that's being completed on site is anticipated to create any problems," Polka explained. "All of this is really precautionary, and just following rules and regulations associated with it because of the complexity of it. But no concerns that anything that we're doing across the street would impact either the existing stadium or any neighboring properties."
Friday's test blast was pretty much what Matwijow expected of the process, and doesn't feel too concerned whether or not the upcoming blasts on site will affect his home or anyone else's house in the community.
To this point in the construction phase of the new stadium, Matwijow feels it has been going pretty good so far.
"Obviously there's a lot of digging and a lot of dirt and dust going on, especially when we had the particulates from the [Canadian wildfire] smoke and stuff, really wasn't gonna be outside those days because the wind does blow this way. But it is what it is, and happy the Bills are staying in Western New York," Matwijow said. "The guys have been working roughly 9-10 hour days, so they really haven't gone the full bore 16 hours that they're talking about, but really they've been using the water trucks as much as they can. They're past really the dusty stage at this point. They're using the shale from the pit and using it over for the new parking lot base. So really, at this point, it's not that bad."
Many residents in-and-around the construction site had a good feeling of what was to come along Abbott Road once the heavy equipment showed up on site and shovels started hitting the ground. Now it comes down to going with the flow of construction, and getting ready for a long road ahead before the stadium is ready to open in 2026.
"There's not too much we can do. We grin and bear it, plan your schedules around when they were doing a lot of the dump trucks coming in-and-out of this driveway, Gate 1. They're around the area," Matwijow said. "It might get a little bit louder when they get into the steel working aspect. When they did the field house, that was 24-hour noise all summer long. That sound, especially when it got above ground, it kept you awake. It definitely kept you awake. So headphones, I guess, you're gonna have to put in or little earpieces just to try to deaden the sound."
So what comes next after the blasting phase is completed come late August, early September?
"Blasting will be complete, they'll complete the mass excavation down to subgrade. At that point, it won't be as linear as all of the blastings and the excavation is complete. Then foundations begin before all the excavation is completed," Polka said. "Sometime in the fall, don't have the exact date yet, the foundations will start in anticipation of the steel beginning [to go up at the] beginning of the following year (2024)."
For several months, Matwijow has been closely tuned in on the workings of the new stadium plans and how things will look once the Bills are moved in and the current stadium is no more. He says, though, others in the community may not realize just how large this project will actually be until the stadium is nearly complete.
"I don't think everybody realizes how tall the potential is," Matwijow said. "The existing lighting towers are 140 feet tall. They went from a three feet dig down to 30 feet, and I'm hearing it might go down as far as 50 feet, depending upon who you talk to. If they're going to be 30 feet, it's not going to be 190 total, but still that's going to be 50 feet taller than the existing thing. It's gonna be a shock for a while, but like anything else, you're gonna get used to it in time."