Stadium Disasters and Near Misses

When you pack thousands of people in a small area for over a hundred years, you are bound to have some bad things happen. Today we discuss the history of football stadium disasters, and near misses in this episode.

January 2022 - According to a reportsin the Newsday a FedEx Field railing in Washington has been labelled a
‘death trap' after NFL fans were seen falling in a frightening railing collapse on Sunday night. The scare took place as Washington hosted Philadelphia Eagles, where the Eagles ran out 20-16 winners. Just after the game was over, Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts made his way off the field
and fans were straining to look reach over the protctive railings trying to get a better glimpse of the young signal caller.
As Hurts made his way down to the stadium tunnel a railing in the stands to his left gave way, resulting in a number of cheering supporters falling over barriers and to the feet of the quarterback.

03 Jan 2022, Mon Newsday (New York, New York) Newspapers.com

December 19, 1976 - A Piper Cherokee airplane crashed into the Baltimore Memorial Stadium upper deck of the stands just minutes after the Colts and the Steelers got done playing an NFL game there. Thankfully no one was seriously hurt although Baltimore police officer Joe Sacco was hit by the aircraft according to the statter911.com website. In the game that was just completed by the way the Colts lost 40-14 to the Steelers.

Our friend author Timothy P. Brown has illustrated some old time stadium disatsters in his book How Football Became Football. Tim points to temporary wooden bleachers as being the main culprit of collapses at some turn of the century games of the early gridiron. The 1902 game where the niversity of Wisconsin played at Chicago's Marshall Field was one instance where some borrowed circus stands buckled under the weight of excited overflow fans and some 500 people were injured. 

Wisconsin was part of another similar incident at a different field in Ann Arbor, Michigan a few years later when they played against the Wolverines. Wooden bleachers crashed to the ground tumbling some 2000 spectators in that incident.

A third time in 1915 happened at a Badgers game when playing Minnesota at Camp Randall when three different sections of bleachers collapsed tumbling fans to a fate not desired by any of them. These instances all in the mid-west brought about scrutiny on the use of wooden stands, some engineering changes as well as inspections.