Obama stage replaces goal posts at Denver's Invesco Field
DENVER -- Preparing for Barack Obama's historic acceptance speech tonight at Invesco Field at Mile High has required an equally historic level of preparation.
More than 200 spotlights. Twenty 18-wheelers full of equipment. A crew of hundreds working nearly around the clock to prepare the stage for the Democratic National Convention's grand finale. "The magnitude of this is incomprehensible," said Bruce Crawford, the stadium crew chief overseeing the preparations.
Crawford has been sleeping in an office at the stadium since Friday night, when the Denver Broncos completed a pre-season game and the work began.
Crews cleared the field of benches, goal posts and rain tarps. The next morning, they began moving in massive components to build elevated platforms for journalists and the main stage — complete with faux-marble columns to mimic Washington's iconic architecture.
Crawford has overseen events at the stadium since it opened in 2001 and has produced concerts and music festivals for 30 years. He said none of that, however, has compared to this week's preparation — workers for news organizations and stagehands tramped up and down while he struggled to protect the $1.5 million field — a complex blend of synthetic grass and real bluegrass.
"It's like a cattle drive," Crawford said as he directed workers laying down mats to protect an area of turf that was being walked on too much.
Diana Bray, a psychologist who lives just outside of Denver, knew early on that she wanted to be inside the stadium for tonight's speech. Her parents were in the crowd in 1963 when Martin Luther King delivered his I Have a Dream speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Tonight — on the 45th anniversary of a speech that helped define the civil rights era — Bray will watch with her husband, her niece and her 13-year-old daughter, Eva.
"She is going to be able to experience something that's historic," Bray said of her daughter. "It's unbelievable to me that (Obama's) where he's at. Hopefully, it'll be special and something that (Eva) will remember the rest of her life."
Related Stories
ABC News Live