An Uncomfortable Design Flaw

Anyone who has been to the Aggie Stadium at U.C. Davis knows that it is a fairly well-designed stadium; enough seating and concessions, no obstructed views, contoured seats which make the regular bleacher seats more comfortable for the duration of a three hour game.  What my family and I found out, however, at this past weekend’s football game is that there is something that the designers did not sufficiently plan for.  These bleachers may work wonderfully in the sunshine and the windy and the clouds, but these bleachers and moisture don’t mix.   When it is raining the bleachers have what is, in my opinion, a simply fixed, yet huge design flaw.  A flaw that I later realized almost every bleacher design has.

The contoured surface, though comfortable in nice weather, we found quickly to be not the best idea.  The designers obviously didn’t consider what would happen when it rained.  Maybe they figured no one would use them when it was raining, who knows, but they did not plan very well for all possible circumstances which is what a good designer would do.  The water when it is raining pools in this dip and has nowhere to flow but horizontally, soaking everyone that is sitting on the bleachers.  Sitting on blankets or tarps or pads is futile because they are no match for the water trapped on the surface.  Then, even after it stops raining, the water just sits there until it is evaporated meaning the bleachers are wet for much longer than they need to be.  My question is why?

A simple solution would be to have holes drilled into the tops of the seats to drain the water.  If holes around the size of a penny (big enough for gravity to pull the water down) were placed in the dip of the surface about a foot apart, this problem would be solved.  This solution would not be expensive or all that time consuming if it had been done while the seats were being manufactured.

You may be saying if you didn’t want to get wet, maybe you shouldn’t have gone to watch a football game when rain was in the forecast.  I say, however, that it shouldn’t matter.  The people that show up to support any team and pay their hard earned money for a seat deserve to have comfortable seats in all weather conditions, don’t you think?