PAWTUCKET, R.I. — When it comes to the Philadelphia Eagles wide receivers at the Super Bowl this weekend, Dan Dwight's got them covered.
The Pawtucket businessman's covering the Patriots, too.
In fact, his company, the Cooley Group, has got the whole field covered, plus all the fans in the stands.
The more than 90-year-old manufacturer made the roof membrane that's on U.S. Bank Stadium, where Sunday's big game will be played.
"We keep the snow [...]
PAWTUCKET, R.I. — When it comes to the Philadelphia Eagles wide receivers at the Super Bowl this weekend, Dan Dwight's got them covered.
The Pawtucket businessman's covering the Patriots, too.
In fact, his company, the Cooley Group, has got the whole field covered, plus all the fans in the stands.
The more than 90-year-old manufacturer made the roof membrane that's on U.S. Bank Stadium, where Sunday's big game will be played.
"We keep the snow and rain out and the heat in," Dwight, the company's president and chief executive, told The Journal on Friday.
The 300,000-square-foot-roof membrane, which weighs 145,000 pounds and is 60 mil — six hundredths of an inch — thick, is made of strips 100 feet long and either 5 or 10 feet wide, Dwight said.
Cooley only makes the material, which is installed on roofs by the project builder.
"When they get up on the roof, they actually weld them together," Dwight said.
Installers use a machine that is pushed along the joint between two strips of membrane. It melts the polymer of the two adjoining strips and fuses them together.
Each membrane strip starts at the Cooley Group's Cranston factory, where the fabric is woven. Then, molten polymer is extruded onto the 5-foot-wide strips at the company's Pawtucket factory. (The 10-foot-wide strips are processed at the company's facility in Lancaster, S.C.)
The 300,000-square-foot membrane — which is enough to cover the area of five football fields with some left over — is far from the biggest the company has ever fabricated.
"We tend to do a lot of big manufacturing production facilities," Dwight said.
Cooley made the roof membrane for the Kohler plumbing fixture company's distribution center in Kohler, Wisc. The membrane there covers 22 acres, about 1 million square feet.
The company also is known for smaller work.
According to Dwight, Cooley makes the fabric on which 70 percent of the billboards in North America are printed.
It also makes all of the awnings for Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks stores, he said.
That hearkens to the company's roots: It was founded in 1926 making cotton painted awnings.
The company has 200 total employees, including 130 in Rhode Island, Dwight said.
In addition to the proprietary polymers used in all its roof membranes, Dwight said the U.S. Bank Stadium roof has some special engineering.
"We spread a little bit of Patriots mojo on it."