Four months.
That’s how long Frattalone Cos. Inc. was given earlier this year to complete the demolition of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis. The tight timeframe didn’t afford Frattalone the opportunity to recycle on site the tens of thousands of tons of concrete the Metrodome provided, though.
As an alternative, Frattalone hauled rubble to two of its sites in the area, where Hanson Custom Crushing Inc. handled the concrete crushing and screening of the world-famous dome. Material was moved off site because construction of the Minnesota Vikings’ new football stadium on site was pressing.
“I think we had probably something in the magnitude of 40 trucks running five to six days a week through a couple of months trucking material off site,” says Scott Spisak, business development manager for Frattalone.
Once material was prepped, Hanson leaned on its portable fleet to process the material. Among the machines that processed Metrodome concrete were a KPI-JCI and Astec Mobile Screens 3055 jaw crusher, a Terex Cedarapids MVP 450 cone crusher, and a three-deck, 6-ft. x 20-ft. Cedarapids screening plant. Conveyors, generators and a Caterpillar 988 loader were key to the job, as well.
Mark Hanson, vice president of operations for Hanson, anticipates his company will have produced between 90,000 and 100,000 tons of road base once the job is complete.
“This was an average-size job for us,” says Hanson, whose company is based in Forest Lake, Minn. “We’ve done jobs up to 400,000 tons. This is a nice size job. What we shoot for is work 50,000 tons and up.”
Hanson, who worked for Frattalone for about 20 years and previously ran its crushing division, ventured on his own about seven years ago.
“It was just an opportunity to try something for myself,” says Hanson, who bought equipment from Frattalone to start his crushing business. “Frattalone is a great company to work for. We still do work for them. They’ve had other people in there crushing but I would say we try to do a majority of it for them.”
The demo job
Outsourcing the crushing-and-screening job made sense for Frattalone because of the demolition job’s demands.
“We got access to the stadium on Jan. 2,” Spisak says. “We had some preparation work to do and the owner, which was the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority, still had possession of the building until about Jan. 18. They were salvaging things they were going to keep. Jan. 18 is about when we took full possession of the building and deflated the roof.”
Frattalone’s deadline to complete the demolition was May 19. The Little Canada, Minn.-based company met the deadline by a few weeks largely because it ran a second shift for about three weeks to process material to be loaded out.
“We put more resources into the project than we might have otherwise had we had more time,” Spisak says. “At one point I think we had 12 hydraulic excavators with various implements processing and demolishing material. We work long hours.”
Spisak says the job went quickly once the stadium was on the ground.
“It was really just getting the thing down to where you could process it,” he says. “That required a combination of traditional crane and wrecking ball; some minor implosion of the ring beam; and removing the upper deck with a high-reach Volvo excavator. We sheared off the concrete, and then the excavators could start processing that stuff.”
Unfortunately for Frattalone’s crews, the weather was not favorable last winter for taking down a building with a 900,000-sq.-ft. footprint.
“It was the coldest Minnesota winter in 35 years,” Spisak says. “It was within the top 10 coldest winters on record [in Minneapolis].”
Surprisingly, Spisak says Frattalone only lost a couple of workdays because of the cold. Crews fought through temperatures that dipped to as low as minus 20, he adds.
“You would’ve wanted a milder winter,” Spisak says.