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Last week’s fire at Mile High Stadium did significant damage to the facility; the video proved it. In fact, the Broncos may not have all of it repaired before the start of the next football season.
Broncos CEO Joe Ellis said Monday that it will be a “real challenge” to replace the damaged seats and to fix the suites that were burned in the blaze. Ellis said that roughly 12 suites were damaged, along with “a couple hundred seats.”
“At first glance, we thought it wasn’t much of a big deal, but after going to see the damage and witnessing it in-person and spending time with fire inspectors and people from our stadium and the reclamation team that came in, it was a significant event,” Ellis said, via Ryan O’Halloran of the Denver Post.
The work becomes more than cosmetic. The flames damaged the steel in the stadium infrastructure.
“The heat from the fire, once it got going, those risers buckled,” Ellis said, via O’Halloran. “We’ll have to re-fabricate those steel risers in those particular sections and with supply-chain issues around the world and each one is a different dimension because of the way the seating bowl is constructed and contoured, it will take some time to get those replaced and they will have to be replaced.”
The stadium will host other events in the interim, including multiple concerts.
Through it all, the Broncos are for sale. The fire could be regarded as a harbinger of doom. Alternatively, the buyer could simply deem that the franchise has been pre-disastered.
