Contact: Rajean Strube Fossen, 856-2028
(Riverton) – Five high school students in the Green Construction Program sponsored by Fremont County BOCES joined 11 employees from United Parcel Service Wednesday in assembling new bleachers at Wolverine Field.
“This is a good project for our Green Construction students,” said Rajean Strube Fossen, Green Construction Coordinator at FC BOCES. “They get to work with other adults on a cooperative project and they gain experience with new building materials.” The new bleacher structures are aluminum. “It’s like a huge Erector set, lots of assembling that requires communication, coordination and teamwork,” she said.
The Riverton High School students on site Wednesday included Chancy McKiernan, Danny Middelstadt, John Schmidt, Jason York and Keith Sack. They were supervised by Strube-Fossen and instructor Tim Hampton.
Volunteers from UPS included Rich Lange, Justin Long, Brett Renke, Tom Yates, Mark Wixom, Ryan Hugus, Rich Lange, Floyd Reinhardt, Randy Duffy, Bobbie Acosta and Joyce Blankenship.
The new bleacher structures, when completed, will increase seating capacity on the “visitors” side of the field to about 500 people, said School District #25 Activities Director Keith Bauder. “When this project is done, we’ll move to the “home” side of the field and double the seating there by extending the present seating higher and moving and elevating the press box,” he said. Bauder said that work, to increase the home side seating to accommodate 1,700 people, would be done this summer. When completed, the new stadium will have seating for 2,200 people.
Bauder said the new seating on the home side of the field would include one section of stadium seats with chair backs and he said the new upper level seating would feature molded plastic seating, but without seatbacks. “That should be more comfortable than sitting on metal,” he said.
The FC BOCES Green Construction students are also working on a duplex project this semester, which is located at South Broadway and Madison, across the street from the new Riverton fire station. The duplex project includes a variety of sustainable building techniques and materials to make the new building much more energy efficient.
