We Got The Tour!

Last Friday was an exciting day for IRE. All of last week the Public Relations Committee, led by Dan, worked on getting us a tour of the new Twins Stadium, Target Field. We had to jump through a few hoops to get the tour. They told us that they weren’t giving out tours, but we decided as a group that this tour would benefit our education, so we went on to talk to the engineers on the project. We were successful in getting the tour. The actual tour of the stadium was awesome. Our tour was led by Kyle Fritze, a Mechanical Engineer with an emphasis in HVAC from Mortensen Construction. To start the tour, he showed us around the Mortensen Office. There were piles of drawings of the different elements of the stadium. He told us the drawings change every time there is problem out in the field. Basically, the drawings have changed hundreds of times. Then we went out to the field to see the ballpark.
We started out the tour by walking around the concourse and looking at the structure. Then we went down to the service level where we got to see the guts of the stadium. We saw all the HVAC systems for heating the indoor parts of the ballpark. We learned about the LEED program while on the tour. The LEED program is a program designed to encourage environmental friendly energy systems. The new stadium has a system that uses exhaust air from the locker rooms to preheat air entering the heaters. Target Field is on track to get a silver certification for the LEED program. Another neat engineering feature is that the field has the ability to handle four inches of rain per hour. In order to do this, the field has six layers of different grades of dirt, and there is 40 miles of drain tile. To prevent the field from heaving due to frost, the field has water coils in it that keeps it from freezing. To end the tour, we got to walk down to the field and check it out. Overall, the tour was highly educational and we look forward to watching the Twins in the new stadium.