How much did the snow weigh that collapsed the Metrodome?

Answer 1

The Teflon-coated fiberglass of the roof covers about 10 acres and weighs over 580,000 pounds according to the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission website.

Snow is tough to call but a rule of thumb figure is 10 cubic inches of snow equal one cubic inch of rain. There are 6,272,640 square inches per acre. 1728 cubic inches per cubic foot. A cubic foot of pure water weighs a bit over 62.4 pounds.

If there were about 10 inches of snow across the roof, then each inch of roof area would equal a cubic inch of water making 3630 cubic feet per acre weighing roughly 225,000 pounds or over 100 tons per acre.

Looking at it, the dome obviously didn't get a uniform coverage of 10 inches (although I understand the Minneapolis metro area got 17" of snow) much less a uniform coverage at all and I don't know enough about how snow sticks to a Teflon dome that maintains a internal temperature of 50 degrees to say much more than that.

The dome went up in Oct. of '81 and suffered snow tears in '81, '82, and '83 that I can find but I don't see any issues for the Halloween blizzard of '91 that dropped almost 28 and a half inches of snow.

Answer 2

The snow that collapsed the Metrodome in Minneapolis in 2010 weighed approximately 17-20 pounds per square foot. The total weight of snow on the roof was around 17 inches of snow, resulting in an estimated 700,000 pounds of weight that caused the collapse.