The battle begins anew each morning, as the sun peeks over the horizon, casting its light on a pockmarked terrain of rubble, machines and spent iron.

Here, hundreds of men and women mass with battered helmets on their heads, goggles dangling from their necks. In their hands are the weapons of their trades: drills, saws, hammers and torches.

They are in the final, frenzied two months of a battle with a rigorous deadline. They will have gone from drawing board to football stadium in two years and two months. The outer shell is nearly complete, the electricity and plumbing all working. But there is still much to be done before kickoff Aug. 8.

This is no time to let up.

Such has it been from the start. Amid clanging steel and choking dirt, the workers have thrown themselves each day at the task of constructing an elegant stadium of green glass and red brick on what used to be a parking lot south of Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

They are architects and excavators and carpenters and crane operators and pipe fitters. They come from union hiring halls and corporate offices. Working with materials as soft as putty and as hard as brick, they give three-dimensional life to a set of blueprints as big and flat as a coffee table.

The job is a high profile one, literally and figuratively. The stadium is about as tall and long as the Titanic and five times as wide. One of the most prominent features on the city's skyline, it is the first thing thousands of commuters and tourists see as they arrive downtown every day.

Any shortcomings are sure to be attacked by fans and an unforgiving media, not to mention taxpayers who are paying the bulk of the stadium's $222 million cost. Conversely, if it succeeds, the stadium could define a new state of the art, just as Oriole Park did for baseball.

This is no simple barn raising. By the time the 69,000-seat stadium opens, more than 200,000 tons of concrete will have been poured and formed, 16 miles of handrails galvanized and installed and more than a million bricks cemented into place.

Steel piles will have been jammed nearly 90 feet into bedrock and delicate light bulbs installed 165 feet in the air.

A jail, weight room and X-ray center will have opened in the basement.

Six hundred forty-seven public toilets and 321 urinals will have been installed and tested in 72 bathrooms. More than a million feet of electrical wiring will have been strung, creating a network capable of handling enough juice to power five buildings the size of Baltimore's World Trade Center.

And it absolutely, positively must be done by Aug. 8, when the Chicago Bears come to town for a preseason game.

Vincent Keim, a foreman supervising the installation of railings on the upper deck a few weeks ago, felt the pressure. And he passed it on down, hustling back and forth between crews under his watch like Stonewall Jackson inspecting his battle lines on horseback.

"It's pretty hard. I'm trying to infect the people with urgency," Keim said between exchanges on a scuffed-up walkie-talkie.

Behind and below him was the muddy dirt that would eventually be a football field. In front of him were the tiered rows of white concrete, about half-filled with purple seats. As he watched workers bolt pewter-colored railings to one corner of the concrete seating bowl, others from a completed section suggested moving on. Keim refused. He wanted all available hands completing each section before going on to the next, doing the job right so nothing has to be redone.

"Just knowing that it's a stadium and that so many people are going to come and see it makes it tougher. It's got to look pretty," Keim said.

Second stadium chance

Nearly 700 people are on the site, the final regiments of a transitory army of 3,000 that will have worked on the project over the past two years. They come in waves depending on their specialties, completing their tours of duty and turning over the work to fresh recruits.

"It's a coming-and-going effect. It's not like anybody's been here from the beginning," said Alice Hoffman, the Maryland Stadium Authority's project manager on the job.

Except her, of course. The 37-year-old, Porsche-driving civil engineer from southern Illinois has experience building bridges, tunnels and buildings. But this is her first stadium.

She turned down overseeing Oriole Park's construction; then, at Opening Day in 1992, she felt like kicking herself for not having taken that job. A second chance came in 1996, after she had moved to Maryland to work for a consulting company, living for a while on a boat at the Inner Harbor.

The state then began building a football stadium for the former Cleveland Browns, now called the Ravens, and needed someone to oversee the construction. She accepted the $90,000-a-year position.

She is the field marshal, working out of a cluttered trailer under the Russell Street overpass, pushing the project along. A sign on her office door reads: "Shut up and Build."

She's not much of a sports fan. Her master's degree in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came with a concentration in construction management. She's drawn to the work for its complexity: making all the pieces fit together, all the people perform their jobs on time and in the proper sequence.

Construction, she noted, is one of mankind's most complex endeavors.

"You have plans and contingencies and fallbacks. You have a common goal, and everybody knows what it is," Hoffman said. "And you have a common enemy: time and money."

So far, money has the upper hand. The budget has been busted by higher-than-anticipated concrete costs blamed, in part, on poor productivity by the contractor, Clark Construction Group. A job that started out costing $200 million will likely hit $222 million. The team has kicked in some cash, and frills have been cut to keep the costs from going any higher.

The state still believes it will deliver the stadium on time. Doing so requires manpower. Lots of it. The job has hit two employment peaks of about 1,000 each, once when the concrete work was at its zenith and another about two months ago when the finishing work was at its height.

Such a payroll is costly: Wages range from $9.80 an hour for laborers pushing brooms to $21.50 for skilled electricians.

There's not a lot of socializing on the site. The work is demanding and the pace brisk. Friends may exchange greetings at the gates before or after work or during safety meetings. But the breaks are short.

"They are really pushing this one. Everything is on a rush-type basis," said Mark Robinson, a 27-year-old caulker from Clinton busy sealing gaps on the stadium's northern club level, a glassed-in lounge area with a panoramic view of downtown.

Six-day workweeks

Down in the basment, Craig Wagner, a 38-year-old, self-employed cabinetmaker, was installing counter tops in a windowless trainer's room. For months, he rose at 4: 45 each morning at his home in Fulton to make it to the stadium at 6: 30 a.m. But he's seen only the parts of the giant stadium where he is working.

"I never have walked around the place," Wagner said.

About half the stadium workers are on on a six-day schedule. Sundays are normally quiet, although it's not uncommon to find a few craftsmen on the job.

The first shifts begin at 5: 30 a.m. or 6: 30 a.m. A short morning break comes at 9 a.m. Lunch is a half-hour, and although the machinery falls silent, most of the workers pull out lunch boxes wherever they happen to be, eating with their work crew. There's no cafeteria or water cooler for congregating. The first of the shifts ends at 2: 30 p.m.

Then a second-shift crew comes in, usually doing work such as heavy lifting with cranes that is best accomplished with a minimum of people on the site. Sometimes there has been a third shift as well, keeping the site alive around the clock.

Having so many people doing so many things in such close quarters inevitably creates friction. Occasionally, a worker will steal another's tools or vandalize his work. Fights break out.

Tension between union and nonunion workers simmers. Wagner, the carpenter, said co-workers have been friendly enough, but he has seen derogatory graffiti inside a portable toilet about nonunion workers such as himself.

"There's union and nonunion people on the job," Wagner said. "If you're in a union, you're pro-union. If you're not, you don't really care one way or the other."

It's not just a matter of money. Maryland law requires the stadium authority to pay prevailing wages, but didn't insist on union workers as some other states have. This angers unionists, who see their once-solid grip on jobs like this slipping away.

Bud Culp, a 60-year-old carpenter working a waterproofing detail on the main concourse a few months ago, for example.

He wore drab green work pants, a mustard-yellow canvas vest and the scraggly white beard of a mariner. His hard hat had a "Proud to be Union" decal. The son of a Western Maryland coal miner, Culp has worked construction for 30 years. He plans to retire once the stadium is finished.

"They say it's a union job, but you get down here and it's half nonunion. My dad was a union coal miner. They don't fool around with that stuff like this," Culp said.

Pickets have gone up twice -- once last year when the AFL-CIO was protesting the paucity of unionized workers at the site and in March, when a handful of drywallers charged their nonunion employer with transferring them out of state when it found the men were union members.

The stadium authority estimates that unionized contractors have gotten about $158 million worth of contracts. And Maryland-based contractors have received $144 million worth of work, the state says.

Haunted stairwell

Whatever their differences, workers on the project have to watch each other's backs. Distractions, inattention or just bad luck can have disastrous results.

In October, ironworker David Scheper was working on the southern stairwell when he took a wrong step and fell 13 feet onto a sheet of corrugated steel.

"I made a big crater," Scheper said.

He landed on his back, with his right arm twisted behind him. It snapped in two places, leaving a bone sticking out above his elbow and his wrist bent in an unnatural, 90-degree angle.

"It didn't hurt that much at the time. But an hour later, when I was at the hospital and they reset it, it really hurt," Scheper said.

Just 10 days earlier, another man had broken both legs in a 25-foot fall from nearly the same place.

Colleagues began whispering about ghosts haunting the unlucky stairwell. It became know as the Indian burial ground.

In November 1996, another worker nearly lost his foot. He was working on a crew pounding pilings 16 inches in diameter into the ground. Standing 60 feet up a ladder, he was maneuvering the heavy pile driver when a hydraulic system gave out and the pile driver crushed his foot against a piling.

The injured man was taken to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center, just up the street. Surgeons managed to reattach his toes, but he missed six months of work. The Ravens sent players to visit him in the hospital. Co-workers took up a collection.

At the outset, the stadium authority hired a full-time safety director for the project, to augment the safety representatives each contractor is required to employ. He convenes weekly meetings and walks the site armed with a digital camera. When he sees a hazard, he photographs it, stops it, and sends the picture along with a fine to the contractor.

Fines range from $50 to $1,000, said Jeff Provenzano, the safety director. He can also fire a worker for acting dangerously.

"A lot of these guys are working long hours, seven days a week. There's a lot of stress," he said.

As do all good commanders, the stadium authority takes steps to keep morale up, to build "unit cohesion" despite the ever-present pressure and danger.

The authority and some of the large contractors occasionally provide a catered meal. There was a Fourth of July cookout, a Labor Day picnic, Thanksgiving lunch and a hot breakfast for Christmas.

On Valentine's Day this year, Hoffman had a few hundred cakes baked and handed them out at the gate as workers left that Saturday. One of the men, who was working his last day before a planned retirement, took it home to his wife and died the next day of a heart attack.

At times like that, construction workers have a tradition of passing a hat for the family. On the Ravens job, hats have been passed for serious injuries, deaths in the family and even one visitor.

Stephen, a 5-year-old boy dying of a brain tumor, showed up on the site in 1996 as the ground rumbled with bulldozers and excavators. Through a grant-a-wish organization, Stephen had asked to see a working construction project.

He came on a Saturday, arriving in a donated limousine, and touched the hearts of the workers. On his head, left hairless by medical treatment, was a Ravens cap and a tiny hard hat. He spent several hours on the site, sitting on the laps of workers as they drove trucks and 'dozers. He went home with a toy crane.

Six weeks later, he died. His grandfather called Hoffman to say the boy spoke often of his visit to the Ravens site. Workers passed a hat on the anniversary of his death to send the family money.

Maintaining efficiency

To an outsider, the stadium looks like barely contained chaos. The broad concourses, which will one day be full of fans munching cheeseburgers and sipping microbrews, are cluttered with lift trucks and strewn with debris. There are boxes of seat brackets, bundles of bricks and empty buckets of drywall mud.

There is even wildlife. Sea gulls appear like clockwork during the lunch hour, hoping to scoop up a dropped french fry. And, each morning, a flock of large, black birds takes up position on the uppermost section of the project. They are most likely crows, but the workers kid about their being ravens, there to check the progress.

"It's like they are watching it," Hoffman said.

In general, the stadium is being built from east to west, from bottom to top.

"We're trying to be very efficient," said Heidi Edwards, a Washington-based architect hired as project manager for the Ravens at the suggestion of Janet Marie Smith, the former Orioles consultant who played a similar role at Camden Yards.

"We have to sequence things so we have a natural progression," said Edwards, 33.

When this progression breaks down, painters overtake the drywallers, or the people bolting the seats to the brackets catch up with the workers bolting brackets to the concrete seating decks. This sets off a ripple of delays that can run around the stadium. Soon, craftsmen are standing around idle for $25 an hour.

'Never stop work'

Supervisors -- "white hats" in construction lingo, so known because of their white hard hats -- hustle to change directions, start a new project, or otherwise accommodate the new hurdle.

"The object is to never stop work," Edwards says.

For example, Waverly Rawlings and his partner, Dante Kelly, were the vanguard of a painting crew that started in the first skybox on the stadium's northwest corner and worked its way clockwise around the oval.

First Rawlings and Kelly come through, armed with pneumatic sprayers and rollers, to prime the walls. A few doors down, another crew followed with the yellow topcoat -- two shades, one for the bulkheads around the windows and a darker hue for the walls.

Behind them were finishers and woodworkers, installing the dark-wood-veneered cabinets and marble counter tops. Then came ceiling and lighting specialists and carpet installers.

There is constant pressure to keep up.

"It's a big job, but they seem to be on top of it. Everybody knows their job and does it," said Rawlings, 32, of Solomon's Island.

Sometimes other craftsmen will nick the paint while installing cabinets or lights or ceiling tiles. A touch-up crew will have to dab these spots later. This is frustrating, but a part of construction.

'Fast-track' system

Rawlings said he has found this job better coordinated than his last, the Redskins stadium at Landover. There have been fewer of the mix-ups that raise tempers and force work to be redone, Rawlings said. The Redskins stadium was built in 18 months. Baltimore's is on a relatively leisurely 26-month pace. (Oriole Park took 28.)

But even that figure is deceiving. Stadiums are unlike most other construction jobs, where designers and architects draw up plans and hand them over to contractors for execution. Projects such as the Ravens stadium are generally conducted on a "fast-track" system in which work gets under way before the design is completed. In the case of the Baltimore project, architects in Kansas City were less than two months into the job when ground was broken at Camden Yards on July 23, 1996.

They decided early in the process how the stadium would be oriented -- with the 50-yard line running just off a north-south axis -- and about how large its exterior would be. That meant the excavators could start in August 1996, digging a hole 900 feet long, 800 feet wide and 18 feet deep.

Then, workers established a point of reference, a ground zero from which everything else would be measured and located. The stadium's "work point," as it is known, is a chunk of concrete about as big as a manhole cover. It is where the 50-yard line will be, precisely where the referee will flip the coin to decide who kicks and who receives (the work point at Oriole Park was home plate).

By the time this was completed, the designers knew enough about what the superstructure would look like that they could say with precision where columns would need to be built.

While designers fleshed out details of the stadium's interior, contractors went to work sinking legs in the ground to give the stadium secure footing. A total of 3,600 pilings were driven into the ground by a massive pile driver. Workers knew they had gone deep enough when each whack of the driver knocked a piling only 6 inches deeper.

Sometimes a piling reached this point 25 feet down. Sometimes, in looser muck, one might go nearly 90 feet. The piles were then pumped full of slurpy concrete and a platform was built around them, from which the stadium would rise.

Then it was upward and onward.

Workers built hundreds of concrete columns, each as wide as a sidewalk. These were connected by concrete beams prefabricated at a factory in Virginia, which were topped by prefabricated slabs or corrugated steel to form the concourses and seating bowls. The effect was not unlike a jigsaw puzzle being assembled.

Walls were crafted under the stands out of cinder blocks and an exterior facing of red brick, mined from Potomac River clay in Western Maryland, was assembled one at a time. Glass went up on the exterior, the heat was turned on and drywallers, carpenters, painters and plumbers moved in to complete the inner portions.

In the meantime, designers for subcontractors worked out details of the stadium's complicated plumbing, electrical and ventilation systems. They couldn't start until the master plan was far enough along to determine how much electricity and water would be needed and where.

As the stadium's form took shape, unanticipated gaps and problems came into view. For example, Hoffman was walking through the place a few months ago, examining the concession stands being built, when she noticed something missing: the 4-inch plastic strip, familiar to home kitchen remodelers, that goes around the base of the wall.

"I went back to my office and looked it up on the plans, and it wasn't there. No one had thought of it," Hoffman said. It had to be added.

'Punching out'

For all the work that has been accomplished, much remains to be done. The club lounges are being decorated. The earth surrounding the site is being bulldozed smooth for landscaping and a whimsical "X's and O's" pattern laid in tile around the north entrance. Installers are finishing the seats, a painstaking job. Installation of the hybrid grass and plastic field -- really a relocation from Memorial Stadium -- is under way.

The deadline is looming.

"One of my bosses is running around like a chicken with his head cut off," said Robinson, the caulker.

As workers complete a part of the job, they turn it over to the final phase -- inspection and correction. The plan calls for all of July to be devoted to this remedial work, called "punching out."

The first wave of July's inspection will come from the architects, who will walk through completed sections drawing up a "punch list" of errors or problems. Next, team and state officials will walk through, going over the list and adding their own items.

No matter is too small for inclusion: a cracked light switch here, a smudged wall there. In coming months, teams will have the laborious job of inspecting each of the 69,000 seats, one at a time, making a note of each one that squeaks, sags or otherwise malfunctions.

Government inspectors, too, have their say. Health officials recently demanded $75,000 worth of additional caulking to the concession stands.

The lists are then turned over to the construction manager, who assigns each item to the contractor responsible. Workers go back in to do the repairs, checking off each item and initialing it on the punch list.

It is detailed, complicated work that can spark confrontations among contractors who blame one another for errors and try to avoid paying for the repairs.

Plenty can still go wrong, but Hoffman is growing confident that the war against the clock will be won.

"Unless we get a fire or tornado or something, we'll be open," she said. "I'm feeling pretty good about it."

Pub Date: 6/15/98