Engineers said much of the worst damage to the roof has come since the collapse, as it shifts under large piles and pools of snow, ice and water. Several planned events have been canceled since the roof collapse, including hundreds of college baseball games, an ethnic New Year celebration and a monster truck rally. Metrodome officials said business interruption insurance should help cover lost revenue from canceled events.
The collapse pushed questions about the Vikings' future in Minnesota to the forefront. The team already had been scheduled to play the final season of its Metrodome lease in and has been pushing for a new stadium for a while, saying its longtime home is not profitable enough for the team and lacks fan amenities.
State lawmakers have promised to bring forward a stadium bill soon that would include a proposed site. There appears to be up to four options, including where the Metrodome now sits near downtown Minneapolis. Two other sites in Minneapolis are under consideration, and several commissioners in next-door Ramsey County are preparing a push for a former ammunition plant site in Arden Hills, north of St. Tony Bennett, the commissioner pushing Arden Hills, said he envisions county taxpayers contributing at some level.
Vikings executives have toured the site and met with county officials, and Bagley said Thursday the team sees the site as "promising. Weather reports in the US usually express atmospheric pressure in inches of mercury, a unit that comes from the old mercury barometer.
Mercury has a unit weight of pcf, so 12 psf is the pressure associated with. This is the pressure differential between the inside and the outside of the Metrodome necessary to keep the roof up with 17 inches of snow on it. That led to even greater concentrations of snow in the valleys, and the huge tears that eventually developed. As the Vikings learned to remake their home-field advantage and become the first team playing home games in a temporary stadium to host a playoff game, work continued on the east end of downtown Minneapolis, sparking developments on nearby blocks and altering the skyline.
The elements — particularly snow removal, but also a desire to incorporate as much natural light as possible — prompted architects with HKS to use state-of-the-art, clear ETFE on 60 percent of the roof. The panels are super strong. Air-support is still incorporated, but over a much smaller span. Bank Stadium became the first major sports venue in North America to use ETFE, which allowed the use of just one centralized ridge truss and saved 2, tons of structural steel.
Bank Stadium shed snow into its giant snow gutter. Heaters melt the snow, and the water goes through the venue's stormwater management system. Bagley: "The fact that we took 12 years to get our stadium deal through the community and legislature gave us plenty of time to visit stadiums throughout the league.
We found out what we liked, what we didn't like, so we kind of had a pretty good vision of what we wanted to see, and paramount to what we wanted to see was a home-field advantage. The Metrodome provided a great home-field advantage in terms of volume level, but building a new stadium and imagining that home-field advantage was the challenge.
Designing it with the ETFE roof, the transparent roof, and the pivoting doors was important. It also turned out that the angle of the roof — and the angle of the roof was designed to get the snow off the roof so we could avoid any future situations — also helped as a reflector. It reflects the sound back and actually sort of angles toward the visiting bench.
So the glass pivoting doors, the ETFE roof was really important to the noise level. And just designing an intimate bowl, an intimate fan experience, turned out to be a great home-field advantage at U. Consider Allen a bit of a traditionalist. Sure he's able to appreciate modern conveniences and a path to the locker room without an elevator filled with hot dog and nacho aromatics, but he also has tremendous memories of playing under the Metrodome's pillow top and wild recollections caused by the roof's demise.
Allen: "Yeah, for sure. They gave us a tour — my wife and I and the kids — and I was just like, 'This is ridiculous. Kids are spoiled these days. The city deserves it, honestly. It's such a beautiful place; it's such a beautiful part of downtown.
I really, I was blown away. They took kind of the best of all the new stadiums around and put it into one. It's phenomenal. It provides such an amazing atmosphere for football, and I'm a little sad I didn't get to play in it. Greenway's career began in the Metrodome on Aug. The first-round pick tore his ACL while covering a kickoff in Minnesota's preseason opener. The South Dakota native bounced back and played through , showing grit on the field and becoming a pillar of the Twin Cities community in which he continues to live.
The Viking for life knows the life of the Vikings, as evidenced by the way the organization managed the crisis to solve immediate problems and continue working toward a long-term solution. Greenway: "Well, I think it says a lot about the Vikings organization. The one thing is, we're a little hamstrung sometimes. Sometimes we get some poor luck. And that's kind of followed us throughout our career, or throughout our organization's [history].
But the other thing I'll say is, very resilient people in general, from ownership, to management, all the way down to our staff — support staff, players and coaches. It never became an excuse. It never became a, 'Well, this happened, so we can't have success.
We wanted to kind of push through that and obviously have success in our own way as a team and as individuals, but I'll say a resilient group, the Minnesota Vikings are. Great ownership. And I think it says a lot about an organization that can go through that crazy, chaotic series of weeks and still come out in one piece. I think you look back at the season, and I'm glad there's a special about this, because it truly is an unbelievable year.
And even from a player's perspective, there's so many things that went on behind the scenes that make it a really juicy story.
I'm glad it's being told. Courtesy of Grant Davisson. This Ad will close in 3. Little did the Vikings know the events that would unfold just around the corner. Minnesota Vikings. Equipment Manager Dennis Ryan. If to this point you've thought Eisenschenk was unfamiliar, think again.
But as it turns out, the Vikings were in for a much bigger precipitation problem. After speeding out of harm's way, Eisenschenk scrambled into action. By Sunday morning, phones were ringing across the metro. Davisson: "It was surreal. And it was cold. I remember how fast it got cold. Despite the additional recovery time, however, Favre was unable to play.
The field that had been clear during the middle of the week endured icy patches. It also wound up being Allen's final game in Vikings Purple. Related Content. The browser you are using is no longer supported on this site.
It is highly recommended that you use the latest versions of a supported browser in order to receive an optimal viewing experience. He says, however, that Geiger—whom Griffis called a "brilliant" engineer—would have agreed that air-pressurized dome technology is outdated.
Even though such structures have advantages—particularly, being lightweight, of high strength and low cost—maintaining such facilities is not nearly as attractive as it was a couple decades ago. The risk of deflation alone has proved problematic, and has occurred several times at inflatable dome facilities, particularly due to snow loads. Griffis also points out that maintenance costs tend to be higher than many owners want to pay; for example, maintaining air pressure can be both laborious and expensive.
Maki says the Minnesota Vikings, who didn't make the NFL play-offs this season, are in serious discussions for a new stadium; whether that means moving to a new location or not is uncertain, but the Metrodome's days as a home for a professional football team could be numbered. Tensegrity structures are supported primarily by high-strength cables whose tension forces are balanced either by air or other support structures, Griffis says. Griffis adds that air-supported structures such as the Metrodome are a particular class of tensegrity structures supported by differential air pressure.
Editor's Note: Scientific American contacted Birdair , the company that manufactures the fabric dome. After calls were twice referred to their legal department, messages ultimately went unanswered. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter.
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