Twisted scraps of metal hung from the bleachers at Memorial Field on Wednesday as their long-awaited demolition got underway.
The project, which began in mid-July, was estimated to take five weeks and cost $385,000, General Services Director Jeff Hoadley said in April.
All in all, the project includes the removal of bleachers and foundations, a small press box for lights and a PA system, removal of soil, new loam and seed, a reinforced backstop for the baseball field and regrading of areas affected by the construction.
“This work will be ongoing for several more weeks,” the Department of Parks and Recreation wrote in a Facebook post this week, as large machinery was beginning to chip away at the structure.
Assessments conducted earlier this year by The Turner Group, a Concord-based architecture and engineering firm, found the main football bleachers and middle baseball bleachers to be “code deficient.”
The firm observed deflections, deformations, breaks and deterioration in the floorboards, seating, stairs, concrete piers and cross-bracing supports under the football bleachers.
The bleachers were last fully renovated in 1970. In 2015, the main football bleachers received an interim seating replacement of 2,001 new wooden boards. The structure itself, according to city officials, has reached the end of its serviceable life.
“Visible structural deterioration — including corrosion, material fatigue and potential instability — creates an elevated risk of injury to spectators,” Hoadley, Parks and Recreation Director David Gill and Public Properties Superintendent Jay Burgess wrote in a presentation to the city in March of this year.
Concord’s first football game is scheduled for September 4. Athletic Director Steve Largy said he plans to bring in temporary bleachers until the construction is complete.
Largy expects the field to be ready to go for games, but said his biggest concern is whether the electrical connections for lights and the PA system will be ready by then. If worse comes to worst, he said, the district will find a way to pivot and find an alternate site.
“This is kind of a product of deferred maintenance that has been ongoing, and we could have probably told you that last year the bleachers were going to be an issue,” Largy said. “And without really any movement on the Memorial Field project, it makes it much more difficult to kind of plan events and make sure that we’re doing things safely and responsibly for our students and for the community.”