As dome dissipates, $275M building begins

By Jeff Swiatek
jeff.swiatek@indystar.com

Excavators and cement trucks. Front-end loaders and tri-axle dump trucks. Compaction equipment and a cement crusher. All jostle for space on the site of the RCA Dome, where the last remnants of the stadium are being removed as construction starts on the $275 million expansion to the Indiana Convention Center.

One set of workers has started pouring concrete footings for the convention center's exhibit halls and three-story new entrance hall, while another group of workers finishes razing the dome and carting off its rubble.

Sabre Demolition of New York has two months left under its $3.5 million contract to remove the debris. A majority of it will be used as fill or recycled in other ways. A concrete crusher on site has created a small mountain of pebblized concrete that's being used as fill or to line roadbeds.

"Eighty percent (of the dome's debris) is not going to the landfill," said Tom Scheele, senior vice president at Shiel Sexton, the Indianapolis contractor that's managing the expansion project with Powers and Sons Construction of Gary.

Removing the dome's debris requires about 100 dump-truck loads a day.

The Indiana Stadium and Convention Building Authority is shooting to finish the massive expansion in late 2010 or early 2011. It will double the meeting and exhibit space in the convention center, allowing the city to host more and larger conventions.

"We are on schedule. The weather's been cooperative," said Lori Dunlap, deputy director of the authority, which offered a media tour of the site Monday.

Erection of steel beams for the expansion starts next month.

Scheele said construction of a 1,200-foot-long, 20-foot-high retaining wall at the rear of the site, adjoining railroad tracks that slice through Downtown, was slowed by the need to remove buried rubble and old foundations left over from when the dome was built in the early 1980s.

Other parts of the dome, like a concourse between it and the convention center, were "not necessarily what drawings show it to be. So we're always asking questions," Scheele said.