No Hail Mary pass for Hamilton’s Ivor Wynne Stadium
RON STANG correspondent HAMILTON, ONT April 25, 2013
Ivor Wynne Stadium, the stadium that was the heart and soul of sports in the Steel City for almost a century, was demolished in only a couple of months, using a staff of 15, a small handful of machines, and a straightforward work schedule that went pretty much like clockwork.
Hometown firm Budget Environmental Disposal Inc., its headquarters just a few blocks from Ivor Wynne, was awarded the tender for the demolition of the almost 30,000-seat former home of the Hamilton Tiger Cats, one of the Canadian Football League’s most storied franchises.
The stadium had to come down to make way for the new Pan Am 2015 games stadium, which will also become the permanent home to the city’s football team. Ivor Wynne itself was originally built to host the British Empire Games in 1930.
Bouygues Building Canada Inc. and Kenaidan Contracting Ltd. are constructing the almost $150 million stadium for Infrastructure Ontario as part of a joint venture known as Ontario Sports Solutions.
The short but manageable Ivor Wynne demolition time frame meant Budget had to work closely with the Pan Am contractor to take down the old stands in sequence so that construction of the new stadium could begin almost immediately.
“We were told from the start that the schedule was tight, we knew it was coming, we basically geared up for it,” Kyle Bouma, Budget’s project manager, said.
Ivor Wynne’s football field was oriented east to west with large north and south stands. The Pan Am stadium will be configured north to south field with east and west stands. This is to reduce sunlight and wind on athletes and provide a better view of Hamilton’s “Mountain” or Niagara Escarpment.
Construction was slated for the Pan Am east stands first. So Budget started working on Ivor Wynne’s southeast corner moving in a southward direction. The company’s 70-foot Volvo 360 High Reach with a VTN rotating shear did the lion’s amount of work. A Volvo 380 with a third member Kinshofer rotating stick shear was there almost beside it for lower level excavation.
The machines, painted with the Ti-Cats logo, dislodged separate stadium bays — not necessarily corresponding to seat sections but to the areas separated by upright columns. Tin wrapped around the top of the stadium was removed first as were the light standards which were toppled forward into the seats.
“We rigged the lighting up with a cable and we basically cut the back portion of the flange and then pulled the light stands over and in towards the stadium,” Bouma said.
The stadium was built of precast concrete panels on top of structural steel.
The demolition process worked like this.
First to be cut was the steel cross-bracing, then the upright columns were pulled back. The precast — upon which bench or chair seats had been fastened — would then drop straight down.
“Once you pulled it forward toward you then the precast would all fall out,” Bouma said. “We’d pull the precast out and then we would cut or shear down the rest of the steel.”
The north stands had to be handled a little more cautiously because of the cantilevered upper seats and the proximity to residential Beechwood Ave., which runs immediately alongside Ivor Wynne. Hydro lines previously were moved across the street.
In this case, the excavator would push the precast up and over to avoid the street and have it slide down the front of the stands.
The next step was to have excavators and Bobcats sort and cut up the steel, which was stored or sold for scrap. Budget is a vertically integrated firm and has a nearby storage yard, using its own trucks to haul away material.
“Once it was pulled down you’d be sorting the structural steel, snipping it into basically stick pieces and then loading it into the bin to be hauled off,” Garreth Barkey, Kenaidan’s site supervisor said.
Added Bouma: “We’d sort them into the different commodities as well — structural steel or bailing or shreds, the miscellaneous metals, then the casts — a lot of the brackets were cast — we’d keep that stuff as well.”
The stands and footings were completely pulled down by February 15 and what remained was sorting and cutting, including the concrete.
While the job was taking place in the middle of winter, the project was not held up much due to weather. The only concern was if the temperature made it too cold to crush concrete.
“It’s kind of a judgment call,” Barkey said. “Because you need to keep the dust down we found minus five or minus 10 (degrees) you wouldn’t be adding (water) at that point because it would just freeze.”
A mobile crushing unit with hopper and jaws, along with varying height stacker belts, crunched the concrete into two-inch OPSD Granular Type 1, much of which will be used as sub-base for the new Pan Am stadium.
One incident occurred Jan. 4 when the High Reach inadvertently moved on to a subterranean tunnel and mechanical room on the south side, and flipped over. Bouma said there was “mostly cosmetic” damage, no injuries, and it took about a day to extract it.
Crushing was completed by the second week of March and Budget’s job finished.
Meanwhile Ontario Sports Solutions had started excavating for the new stadium two weeks prior, as well as begun work on the perimeter wall and western stands’ footings.
Construction of the Pan Am also faces a “compressed schedule”, Barkey said.
The 22,500 fixed seat stadium, built to FIFA and CFL standards, must be delivered by July 1, 2014.
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