The Vikings’ new stadium has a large glass roof. Which raises a fair question.
Who will clean the bird droppings and stuff that could land on the roof?
“The [ethylene tetrafluoroethylene] product is self-cleaning,” Vikings V.P. of public affairs/stadium development Lester Bagley recently told Bob Sansavere of the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “It’s the largest clear roof in the world and the first on a stadium in the U.S. There are some in Europe.”
Bagley explained that the self-cleaning will be accomplished by “rain and moisture.” Which makes the roof “self-cleaning” in the same way parking a car in the rain makes the vehicle “self-washing.”
The sloped roof also should cause snow to slide off; then again, the roof of my house is sloped, but the snow doesn’t slide off. Then again, given what happened at Cowboys Stadium during Super Bowl week in early 2011, maybe the Vikings don’t want the snow or ice to slide off.
“There’s a basin that catches the snow and prevents it from going down to the street,” Bagley said. “It slides off the roof into a gutter, essentially, and it breaks up from there. It will be very safe.”
Regardless of the details, designers surely engineered the building to withstand and manage the elements. After what happened in Minnesota late in the 2010 season, no one reasonably can claim that they didn’t know the roof of the football stadium could be self-opening.
