In watching the news from Minneapolis, I was found myself travelling down Memory Lane a bit. In 1991, I was living about a mile from the Metrodome, and the Twin Cities got hit by a nasty blizzard similar to what happened over this past weekend. I can’t remember how much snow the Twin Cities got during that storm, but after a certain point it hardly matters. Cold and miserable is just a matter of degree- or in this case a lack of degrees and a plethora of blowing and drifting snow.
No, the Metrodome roof didn’t collapse during the 1991 blizzard, but Sunday morning’s collapse isn’t the first time it’s happened. It’s at least the third occasion, insofar as my memory holds up. What the roof’s collapse did, though, was to remind me of a question I remember asking when the Metrodome was built in the early ’80s. Why, in a climate as harsh as Minnesota’s, was a domed stadium built with a fabric roof supported primarily by air pressure? In a part of the country where heavy snowfall is not an unusual occurrence, why put up a roof that can easily be collapsed by a heavy accumulation of snow? What engineering genius thought this was a good idea?
No other stadium in the country has had to deal with this issue, and the reason is that the roof on the Metrodome is the result of a spectacularly poor design decision. Yes, I understand that this weekend’s blizzard was one of the worst on record, but it’s not as if the engineers responsible for the Metrodome’s design were unaware of what Minnesota winters can be like. Given the frequency with which the Metrodome’s roof has collapsed, isn’t it about time that someone admitted that the design was a tremendous mistake? And if the Vikings are to remain in the Metrodome, shouldn’t some serious thought be given to replacing the roof with something more suitable to the climate and less prone to collapse? Or do you like the idea of the Vikings playing their home games in Detroit?
