New York Jets/New York Giants, New Meadowlands MetLife Stadium, East Rutherford
New Jersey
Date: 2009, 2018, 2023
NJ Meadowlands Jets Giants MetLife Stadium EMSEAL stadium expansion joints
EAST RUTHERFORD, NJ–As the Meadowlands prepared itself for its biggest day in football—Superbowl XLVIII—one thing was certain—the stadium expansion joints were ready.
In the same way that the Meadowlands ushered in the era of billion-dollar stadiums, it also marked a watershed in the structural expansion joint industry. With seismic stadium expansion joints 10-inches (250mm) wide, and a design requirement that they be watertight at the deck surface, through all direction and plane changes, between different deck and wall technologies, and capable of handling rolling point loads in concourses and split-slab conditions on the upper decks, the scope of performance expectations was extraordinary.
With design by HOK (360 Architecture), architectural detailing by Ewing Cole, and structural engineering by Thornton Tomasetti, all working under a design-build arrangement with SKANSKA USA, bridging and sealing these large (10-inch nominal) seismic expansion joints fell to Emseal and installer Schnell Contracting Services.
It’s hard to believe that 8+ years have passed since installation began of the 4,200 LF of SJS System and SJS-FP expansion joints in the 83,000 seat, 1.6 billion dollar new Meadowlands Metlife stadium. With stainless-steel coverplates throughout—on the concourses, treads, and even on the risers—the Jets/Giants really did it right.
Despite 18-inch wide stainless steel cover plates, the finished product in the bowl is nearly unnoticeable to the casual observer.
Even close up, the SJS System is unobtrusive and the long-bevel, flint-blasted coverplates provide an accommodating walking surface.
Here’s how it went down…
The new stadium was erected immediately adjacent to the old.
Seen through the massive louvre-like facade elements, a pile of seats from the old stadium are staged for disposal.
At it’s center you can just see the crew of Schnell Contracting Services working on one of the expansion joints. The massive bowl of MetLife Stadium is 2 miles around in circumference. It is divided into 4 sections by 24-inch wide structural expansion joints.
As seen in the full-scale mockup, these structural openings in the bowl as well as in the concourses, were reduced to 10-inches using cantilevered metal-angle substrates to accommodate the expansion joint sealing system.
The metal angles, were abraded, coated in epoxy and seeded with sand. This was done to ensure a durable and properly-bonded substrate to which to apply the Emcrete blockout filler material.
The joint gaps were formed with extruded polystyrene, and…
…the epoxy-and-sand-coated blockouts were primed using Emprime.
Using a non-sag additive and Emcrete elastomeric nosing material, the blockouts were trowell-filled in the risers, and…
…it acts as a leveling bed for the cover plates. To eliminate all rocking in the plates, they are loosely laid over across the joint gap and rocked by a worker. The high spots are noted, the plates removed, and the nosing material is ground to achieve level.
For the mockup, as for the entire project, each tread and riser section of SJS System was custom-fabricated to field measurements made by the contractor. Each piece was labeled and staged adjacent to its place in the bowl. Each piece comes precompressed to less than the joint size and with pre-attached hanger bars to aide installation.
Emseal-supplied, epoxy is applied to the joint faces and…
…the custom, tread-riser assembly is inserted into the joint, into the wet epoxy.
At the tread to riser interface of each interlocking section, a bead of Emseal-supplied silicone is applied.
The process is repeated to install all the interlocking tread/riser, foam/spline, custom-90 assemblies of the SJS System.
Once the system has self-expanded firmly into the wet epoxy, a silicone sealant band is gunned between the silicone-bellows and substrates. The excess silicone from the sealant band is tooled into a corner bead along the blockout edges.
