MOUNT AIRY, NC—Regions Field, home to the Birmingham Barons, an AA affiliate minor league team of the Chicago White Sox, needed a quick fix for a fast-track renovation project. The ballpark opened in 2013 and prior to the start of the 2014 season they found they needed to run utilities for the dressing rooms in the mezzanine level of the park. It was a unique problem; they'd already poured the concrete slab and couldn't cut into it, so would have to run the utilities on top, but that meant they would have to insulate and cover them.
The original design called for laying sandwich concrete slabs and insulating between the slabs, but engineers nixed the plan as too heavy for the one foot-18-inch concrete foundation. The second attempt employed hand-­cutting 8-­10-inch thick sheets of Styrofoam and placing it between the sandwich slabs. Again, the sheets were weighty, and the process was taking too long.