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BASES LOADED: Meet the Building Team
BY AMANDA PENNINGTON
From October 2017 to March 2020, Manhattan Construction team members and their trade partners spent more than 6 million work hours constructing the 1.8-million-square-foot ballpark, Globe Life Field, for the Texas Rangers in Arlington, Texas.
A project of this size and complexity requires a construction and design team that cohesively works together with precision to provide the Texas Rangers with a spectacular ballpark on opening day and thereafter.
“Projects like this are a lot different than a school or an office building,” Jim Cuddihee, vice president of operations at Manhattan Construction, said. “On a big project like this, the dedication that everybody has to get [the stadium] built in the timeframe that we have — we know that on March 14, Chris Stapleton and Willie Nelson will have a concert here, and we know that on March 31, the Rangers are going to have opening day and play baseball — there’s no not hitting those dates. Everybody just needs to come together as a team and get to the same end result.”
Approximately 60 Manhattan office employees work on the stadium, including superintendents, project managers, and project engineers. Another 70 hourly Manhattan employees work in the field as carpenters, laborers and operators. Including trade partner team members, approximately 11,000 people have worked on site throughout the life of the project.
According to Greg McClure, Manhattan Construction senior vice president of North Texas and project director of Globe Life Field, the project team includes a range of Manhattan employees, “from vice president to project engineers who are just straight out of college and coming to work for the first time in their careers.” Between trade partner staff and Manhattan staff, “we average about 1,600 workers on-site each day. That’s your craft workers, the guys who are installing the drywall, painting the walls, installing the tiles, painting the steel, laying concrete … and an untold amount of management in all of those contractor trailers that are managing each one of the roughly 110 subcontractors.”
To stay organized, the Globe Life Field team is sorted according to job duties. “Every scope of work has a full team on it,” McClure said, “where you’ll have a project engineer, a project manager, an assistant project manager and then a superintendent who’s overseeing their scope to ensure that everything gets done on the job site correctly.”
For example, at the beginning of the project, Manhattan learned some connection details would be more involved than originally expected. Oklahoma-based W&W AFCO Steel handled steel fabrication and collaborated with Manhattan engineers to plan for the amount of steel, install the structures, test operations and stay on schedule. This achievement alone, McClure said, “is just an unbelievable feat of sheer will and manpower to get things done,” considering Globe Life Field is one of the largest steel structures currently being built in the U.S.
The steel structure also required more safety measures. “With our steel suppliers, those guys are in harm’s way every day just because of where they work,” McClure said. “They’re walking on beams 230 feet up in the air, and they do it in a safe, organized manner and have gotten this building in place and the roof operable within the same timeframe of what we anticipated [in 2017].”
Safety was a daily part of building Globe Life Field. It has been Manhattan’s No. 1 priority throughout the project’s 6 million work hours. “We have a very robust and aggressive safety program, which is called Operation Zero,” Mc- Clure said. “Our demands of upper management is that we have zero accidents on a project.”
Manhattan and OSHA signed an OSHA Partnership agreement for the Globe Life Field project on July 26, 2018. This is Manhattan’s fifth OSHA Partnership. This collaboration allows OSHA to train their compliance officers on Manhattan sites while helping Manhattan leaders train employees on OSHA procedures. The OSHA
– ROB MATWICK, EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, TEXAS RANGERS
Partnership is one part of Manhattan’s strategy to continually take safety to the next level.
“They train their personnel … and do inspections with us, just walking the job site,” McClure said. “They provide all kinds of benefits to our subcontractors,” because if Manhattan’s smaller subcontractors don’t have a safety program in place, this partnership gives OSHA a way to help them.
“We don’t look at OSHA as some sort of police state,” McClure said. “They are our partner. They help us by being a second set of eyes, and [they] assist with reviewing everything on our site to make sure that everything is done in a way to prevent accidents to the everyday worker out there on the job site.”
The partnership demonstrates Manhattan’s commitment to safety. “We require everybody to go through orientation before they’re allowed out on-site,” Cuddihee said. “We strive to send everybody home in the same condition they came to work each day. We really try [to] get the workers out on-site to look out for each other. They might not work for the same company, but there’s a shared respect.”
With 1,600 Manhattan workers on-site at once, it is a significant challenge to uphold the “zero accidents” standard — but with teamwork, it’s possible. “We have on-site safety personnel who [run] an almost hourly review of everything everyone is doing,” McClure said, “to make sure they are doing everything in a safe, reasonable manner to prevent accidents and to prevent harm.”
From start to finish, the Globe Life Field team has faced unexpected challenges and proactively resolved them. When the project first began in October 2017, “we set dates and milestones of when things would be turning over. We’re hitting those,” McClure said. “That is not an easy task when the design is really involved … but we have some really talented people who are able to perceive what was going to come and get that in the schedule. It was very well planned by our project staff.”
With the finished stadium already a popular venue for community events and, of course, baseball games, Manhattan and its trade partners can look at Globe Life Field with a special sense of accomplishment. “It sure is fun to … watch it all come together,” McClure said. “It’s an accomplishment that not everybody gets to do in their career.”
