Today I went off to the new Cape Town Stadium for a look see and checkout whats going on in and around the stadium.

Undoubtedly, the roof has to be the most advanced part of Cape Town’s new 68000 seater stadium and has some amazing features. It has been designed to withstand Cape Town’s notorious black south easter’s and the roof can move as much as 1.5m in the wind horizontally. It even comes with earth quake dampners (Cape Town had tremors in 1969 from the Tulbagh earthquake of 6.3). The floating roof is suspended on an inner ring of cable that was lifted by tightening the connecting cables from the outside to the centre ring and it lifted off the ground! Each glass panel weights an average of 95kg and there are 9000 of them!

At its peak there were 3500 people working on it. With construction running 24 hours a day. There are 13000 temporary seats that are going to be done away with afterwards and the area converted into conferencing facilities. Water runoff from the massive glass roof is channeled to a holding dam and then utilised to water the golf course and surrounding areas.

It will have 2 x 75m2 electronic screens from Sony. All the doors, lights, cooling etc are all centrally controlled from the VOC. The stadium has 3×1.5MVA generators to power the whole stadium, no worries about blackouts!

The grass for the stadium is being grown in Milnerton, the steps, seats and most of the concrete was actually formed offsite, transported at 2am and put in place in the early hours of the morning to prevent congestion on Cape Town roads.

We visited the VIP area, the media centre and the changerooms for the new stadium, quite smart!