The City of Arlington has completed its review of AT&T Stadium following a troubling incident in which a large piece of metal fell from the stadium’s roof just before Monday night’s Cowboys game versus the Houston Texans.
The roof mishap was a focus of ESPN’s Monday night football countdown.
X user AwfulAnnouncing’s posted the ordeal to social media, raising further concerns about the safety of the Cowboy’s home. Yet, officials in Arlington inspected the roof, determining the cause of the falling metal, and no longer considered the incident a continued safety threat.
On Tuesday, the City of Arlington released a statement detailing the results of the stadium’s recent inspection, which involved a city building inspector, the deputy fire marshal, and representatives from the Dallas Cowboys organization.
According to the statement, the metal piece that fell from the roof was a cover that had not been adequately secured. The cover, which sits atop a cable tray used to house electrical wires, became dislodged due to high winds while the roof was being opened. The wind gusts, which had been strong throughout the day in DFW, are believed to have caused the cover to fall, according to Fox 4 KDFW.
“The metal was a cover that had not been properly secured on top of a cable tray, which is where low-voltage electrical wires are grouped together…While the roof was open, wind blew the unsecured cover off the cable tray, which was on the catwalk near the top of the stadium. No further inspection is needed,” the statement read.
Despite the mishap, no one was injured, and the Cowboys quickly closed the roof after the piece fell.
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones addressed the media after the Monday night game, explaining that the structural error was caused by recent wind damage.
“Wind apparently did a little damage. And then when we tried to open it up, the winds got underneath the roof at that time,” Jones explained. “Everybody agreed that it did some damage, but check around, Dallas had wind gusts all afternoon.”
However, this recent incident is just one in a series of notable mishaps in the stadium’s history, including a 2011 accident when sheets of ice and snow fell from the roof, injuring six workers ahead of Super Bowl 45, per ESPN.
Additionally, the stadium has been the subject of ongoing debates over sun glare, with some players, like Cowboys receiver CeeDee Lamb, citing issues with blinding sunlight through the stadium’s west-end windows, as reported by The Dallas Express.
When asked about the most recent roof mishap, Jones responded to the media with a somewhat cloudy response, saying, “It’s fixable, but you didn’t have… that wasn’t the situation, the time or otherwise, to do it tonight… And certainly, there was no risk at all to anybody on the field playing once we shut the roof.”
The Cowboys organization has since taken additional measures to secure all similar roof covers, according to Fox 4, and the team has reaffirmed that there are no current structural concerns with the stadium or its roof.
