Las Vegas Stadium Allegiant Stadium Roof 80 Days Behind Schedule, Oakland Raiders, Oakland A’s News
ONN – Las Vegas Stadium Allegiant Stadium Roof 80 Days Behind Schedule, Oakland Raiders, Oakland A’s News
Vital Vegas, Las Vegas best blog in this blogger’s view, often breaks stories the Las Vegas mainstream media either misses or just doesn’t want to report. In my personal experience I can’t remember when Vital Vegas, the media brand and admitted hobby of of Scott Roeben, has ever been wrong about news it broke. Scott’s not said much about Las Vegas Stadium, so when he does, that is news, in itself.
For example, Scott Roeben got the story of the sale of Rio Las Vegas Hotel before anyone else did. Thus, I and others paid great attention to his tweet on Las Vegas Stadium Allegiant Stadium. This one:
Yikes. Hearing roof at Allegiant Stadium is 80-100 days behind on construction schedule.
https://twitter.com/VitalVegas/status/1179534526218784769
That formed the main topic for the livestream on Zennie62 on YouTube (click to subscribe please). Note that Vital Vegas did not write that the some aspect of Allegiant Stadium roof construction would be delayed, just that whatever was going on, it would lead to a delay of 80 to 100 days.
That comes as no surprise. The process of building the structure for what is called the ETFE Roof is complicated. Oakland Raiders Construction Manager Don Webb told Rick Velotta of the Las Vegas Review Journal “It’s not just understanding all of the steps that have to be taken, but understanding the sequence that makes the most sense so you’re not painting yourself into a corner. That’s why the schedule has 23,000 tasks on it and they simulate it (the roof installation) on the computer, animate it and run the simulation to see where everything is on any given day.”
Fluxuating temperatures and wind gusts can prove to be the enemy of the Las Vegas Stadium construction process. Just three days ago, Las Vegas played hosts to winds reportedly up to almost 20 mph. That changing pattern in a 2019 Las Vegas weather story that has seen record rains and even snow, makes the process of the reportedly planned, daily lifting of the roof into place high above the stadium floor that much more complicated, and problematic.
“The thermal expansion and contraction of this building will be several inches so there will be a prescribed range of temperatures for those final connections,” Webb told Velotta for the Review Journal. “If it’s not within the tolerances, we will have to wait. That’s why we scheduled the way we did. We had to look ahead and anticipate when this is going to occur. We had to look at historic temperatures and figured out the time of day the final connections should be made.”
Looking at historic temperatures in Las Vegas, and considering how crazy the weather has been, it’s no wonder there’s a problem at Las Vegas Stadium. Don Webb has said, many times, that the stadium schedule aggressive was difficult to meet. The Raiders should remember that Las Vegas Weather didn’t get the memo that it was supposed to cooperate with the construction timeline.
What does this news mean for the Raiders? Well, looking at where the stadium complex is now, and considering that it’s now October 4th, it’s hard to see how it’s going to be completely ready to be open in less than one year. The forecast expressed at Zennie62Media has always been October 31, 2020. I see no reason to back off that.
If that date of opening comes to pass, the Raiders may wind up playing at the Oakland Coliseum yet again in 2020.
Stay tuned.
Note from Oakland News Now Technical: this video-blog post shows the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. The uploaded video is from a vlogger with the Zennie62 on YouTube Partner Channel, then uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-owned social media pages. The overall objective is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours. Now, news is reported with a smartphone: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.