Work at San Mamés is progressing at a good pace

‘Right now we are finishing off the work of concreting the second floor, which will leave us with the third and fourth floors to do, which are smaller. This will mean we will have finished the concrete and mixed structure of the stadium. In addition, the metal roof supports are being prepared. The first phase of the outermost porticos starts on the first floor up to the roof of the fourth floor, which will be the crowning, and from there up to the roof will be the last phase where we will put the main pyramids and trusses in place to structurally finish off the stadium project’. These are the words of Oscar Malo, one of the engineers responsible for the project.

One of the most important things has been to close the ‘ring’ that joins the rest of the ground with the new stands: ‘The entire lower tier is finished. We are working on the intermediate ring, the boxes and the seats now and starting the upper tiers. The aim is to have full capacity for next season’. The way the work is progressing is ‘spectacular. There are about 150 people working, although there have been peaks when there have been 600. It is going to be a wonderful ground, worthy of being visited’.

Oscar Malo explained to us that ‘it is very complicated and there was a small break when assembling what goes between the concrete part and the composite structure, but that is usual for this type of major work. The tolerances that we handle are just a few millimetres, so everything has to be adjusted with no detail spared. To give you an idea, at the end of the truss we are working with differences of about 25 millimetres, so if we start off a few millimetres out at the bottom, it will never be right further up’. The numbers are impressive: ‘So far we have used about 70,000 cubic metres of concrete and we have now got less than 10,000 to put in place. We have still got to do the metal roof structure and the outer casing to finish fitting out the full capacity. Subsequently we will undertake the interior, which will take us about six months more at normal rates. We need to emphasise the efforts of the whole team’.