Repairs to Reliant Stadium roof winding down

Repairs to Reliant Stadium roof winding down
February 3
Houston Chronicle
"Reliant Stadium’s retractable roof has lost its gap-tooth look and should as good as new in plenty of time for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which runs March 3-22.

The five giant panels that were torn asunder by the fury of Hurricane Ike — or debris flung through the air by the storm — in the wee hours of Sept. 13 have been replaced and the process of tightening, stretching and waterproofing the new pieces is well under way with completion expected by mid-February.

“Right now, we’re making sure all the detail work is done,” Mark Miller, the Reliant Park general manager, said Monday. “The repairs are substantially complete. We’re expecting it to be 100 percent for the Rodeo.

“But we probably won’t have our first real good test until they get all the final connections made and then get a good hard rain to see how much touch-up there is to do after that. We can’t water-test it ourselves.”

To be sure, nobody makes a garden hose big enough. Each of the giant panels is 325 feet across and consists of more than 12,000 square feet of a Teflon-coated fiberglass membrane. They had to be hoisted into place by helicopter. That took only a couple of days, but the “tensioning,” to prevent the panels from flapping when the wind blows, requires a methodical process that will end up taking about a month.

“I won’t say we couldn’t have gone forward (without the repairs),” Rodeo general manager Skip Wagner said, “but it would forced us to make major changes and that would have been really bad news. It’s my understanding the roof isn’t certified to be closed with the panels missing.”

Dry weather beneficial

Near-drought conditions, certainly for the season, plus moderate temperatures have been a godsend, all parties concede.

“They’ll lighten up, too, in time,” Miller said. “From the outside, they really don’t look any different.”

The repairs, to be paid for by Harris County’s insurance policy on the stadium and FEMA funds, are going to cost approximately $4 million. Investigators for Birdair and the insurance adjusters are just now beginning to study the damaged panels to determine why they came down, but there’s some evidence to suggest they were struck with airborne projectiles pried loose from nearby structures."
Link