Good morning. This is LEADOFF, today’s first look at Atlanta sports.
Here's the latest on Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which hosts its first event in 29 days: The roof is closed. The floor is turning green.
Up top, the retractable roof has been slowly moved from the open position to the closed position over the past couple of days -- “construction move 4,” it was called. And about 340 feet below, installation of the green artificial-turf playing surface is well under way.
The FieldTurf surface is scheduled to be completely installed by Aug. 5, but Falcons president and CEO Rich McKay expects the job to be finished sooner.
“Knowing FieldTurf and dealing with them before, they tend to get things done early,” he said.
The turf is being installed atop permeable asphalt, shock pad and a mix of sand and rubber, McKay said. Unlike in some other retractable-roof stadiums, the field is designed to drain water in case rain arrives unexpectedly with the roof open.
“We spent a lot of money to make sure we could drain the field and play events in an open-roof configuration and not worry about rain,” McKay said.
Of course, it now is known that no events will be played with the roof open for quite a while.
If you missed it: Steve Cannon, CEO of Falcons/Atlanta United parent company AMB Group, disclosed Tuesday that the retractable roof will be closed when the stadium debuts next month (and will remain closed well into the Falcons season) because work won't be completed on automating the roof. Cannon indicated it'll take more than 40 days after the stadium opens for the automation/mechanization to be completed. It may take significantly longer than that, because contractors had estimated 40 days if the work were done without events in the stadium. In this case, the work will have to be managed around a heavy schedule of stadium events and, of course, whatever further problems might emerge.
Over the course of two days after Cannon’s announcement, the roof was slowly moved to the closed position.
This “construction move” was the fourth of six such test moves planned before the stadium opens. Within the next couple of weeks, in construction moves 5 and 6, the roof will be shifted back to the open position once more and then returned to the closed position for the stadium’s debut. In these tests, the eight steel roof panels, called petals, are slowly and methodically moved, one at a time. When fully automated, the petals are supposed to move simultaneously to open or close the roof in about 12 minutes with, essentially, the push of a touch-screen button.
For now, the Falcons posted a time-lapse video showing the roof closing over 48 hours:
Compared to the roof, installing the field is a walk in the park.
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