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A Difficult Design Problem: How to Shovel Snow Out of a Stadium During a Blizzard

Buffalo Bills fans faced a Herculean task

By Rain Noe - January 16

in Social Impact

This weekend the Buffalo Bills tweeted out this photo…

…and appealed to local fans on social media: Please come help shovel out the stadium, in advance of Monday's game vs. the Steelers. Fans could show up at midnight before the game, would be paid $20 per hour and given free hot beverages and breakfast, the team added.

The volunteer shovelers who showed up had to deal with snow continuing to fall at 2" per hour. This is what the scene looked like:

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What I was wondering, looking at the images/videos on social media, is: How the heck do you shovel a stadium? Descending row after row of folding seats and a narrow walkway? You can't just shovel each row's snow down onto the next row—the task would quickly become Herculean.

The solution someone came up with was to set up chutes running down to the field, where trucks waited to cart the snow off. Each row's snow would be shoveled into the chute. However, snow began to stick in the chutes, and then needed to be cleared. Apparently that was this guy's job:

I mean, insane.

This is quite the challenging design problem. Anyone have any ideas?

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Nicholas Hayhoe

11 months ago

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I think they solved this the right way, and that's to scale up labor as needed. The chute is genius. There may be other ideas similar to this scale and I'd love to see some in the comments. If they rebuild the stadium someday, they may integrate radiant heat in the concrete (like in the streets and sidewalks of Holland, MI) or build a stadium with a roof (novel concept!). But for these rare events, just rally the mafia and get after it.

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Jason Blandford

11 months ago

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I think this is one of the reasons Elon Musk marketed his "flame thrower." Not sure if it would melt the seats, though!

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