NFL stadiums will soon double as disaster shelters, federal officials say

As Hurricane Katrina ravaged Louisiana in 2005, more than 20,000 people sought a makeshift shelter in the Superdome, the home stadium of the New Orleans Saints.

Nearly two decades later, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Football League are partnering to turn football stadiums across the country into emergency shelters, temporary hospitals and other venues needed during disasters, according to details shared with The Washington Post.

The initiative, which comes as Florida deals with a major hurricane, and floodwaters from Hurricane Francine soak Louisiana, aims to better prepare communities for catastrophic events.

The initiative doesn’t initially include Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, but that could change.

“Lucas Oil Stadium stands ready to serve our community in cases of emergency by working with our Federal partners at FEMA and State Homeland Security,” Eric Neuburger, director of Lucas Oil Stadium, told IBJ in an email.

Poor preparation and other problems have plagued past attempts to turn stadiums into shelters. New Orleans officials have said the Superdome, for instance, was intended as a refuge of “last resort” and lacked enough food, water and supplies to support thousands of people.

FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said in an interview that the new initiative will better prepare local officials so that they are not scrambling to respond to disasters as they unfold.

“The biggest difference between this and Hurricane Katrina is we’re doing this in advance,” she said. “We will know what the capabilities of each specific stadium are, and we will work with them on the threats in the cities that they’re in.”

Criswell noted that New York City—where she was the top emergency management official from 2019 to 2021—used stadiums as temporary hospitals and vaccination sites during the coronavirus pandemic, helping spark the idea. The NFL approached FEMA with the idea nearly three years ago.

“It just made perfect sense,” said Criswell, who added that she hoped Major League Baseball and other sports leagues would follow suit. “We have all of these existing venues. How do we better coordinate during these blue sky days to better understand what they bring to the table and what we can use them for in the future?”

Cathy L. Lanier, chief security officer for the NFL and former D.C. police chief, called the partnership “an obvious fit.” The two parties formalized the agreement by signing a memorandum of understanding on Tuesday at the NFL headquarters in New York City alongside Roger Goodell, the longtime NFL commissioner.

The stadiums would be available year round, according to FEMA director of public affairs Jaclyn Rothenberg, and the cost of operating these temporary shelters in the case of a federally declared disaster would be negotiated among local, state and federal government officials. The venues could be used for staging generators or for command-and-control centers, she added.

As climate change increases the severity of hurricanes, wildfires and floods, evacuating and sheltering thousands of people can pose major challenges for local governments, especially those with tight emergency management budgets. One of the greatest challenges is finding large spaces and hotels to house thousands of people—and then finding the funds to keep them there for weeks.

When Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida’s Lee County in 2022, for instance, residents had to drive for hours to find open hotels. Many had to stay in shelters for weeks, and Lee County had issues with staffing all of them. When Hurricane Laura lashed Louisiana in August 2020, disproportionately affecting Black and poor neighborhoods, dozens of people, including seniors, had to drive hundreds of miles to find refuge.

Disaster experts said that having NFL stadiums as spaces to store resources and use as emergency operations centers could help during extreme weather events. But there could be resistance to the idea, they said, and sheltering thousands of people for a week or more could be challenging.

“The emotional aspect and mental resistance of what we learned went on at the Superdome during Katrina could be a hard thing, especially in Florida and Louisiana, for people to overcome,” said Doug Quinn, CEO of United Survivors Disaster Relief. “There is still collective trauma of what happened there. How willing will people be to go to a shelter like that?”

Those who end up at shelters often are elderly or vulnerable, have lower incomes and have nowhere else to go, Quinn added, so ensuring those populations are safe could be a struggle.

Mike Sage, an emergency preparedness expert with the Public Health Institute, said providing privacy for proper hygiene could be hard. Individual tents, he added, could help.

“If you just line up cots along the football field and you have thousands of people, that’s okay for a couple of days,” he said. “But if it will be long term, you need to make it more comfortable.”

Sage added that it would be important to test stadiums’ capacity to operate during weather disasters, including whether they’re prepared “to provide electricity when all the electricity is down.”

So far, four venues have signed on: MetLife Stadium west of New York City, home of the Jets and the Giants; Acrisure Stadium in Pittsburgh, home of the Steelers; Lumen Field in Seattle, home of the Seahawks; and Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, which hosts the Buccaneers. SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, where the Rams and Chargers play, is expected to join in coming weeks.

Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium was designed to withstand the earthquakes that often strike Southern California. A 100-foot-deep, 12-foot-wide “seismic moat” separates the stadium’s underground structure from the surrounding soil, allowing the stadium and the roof to move independently from each other during a quake.

Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium lies in the path of the hurricanes that frequently pummel the Florida panhandle. While the stadium was spared the worst damage from Hurricane Ian in 2022, a potentially landmark hurricane—to be named Helene—is expected to rapidly intensify in the Gulf of Mexico before hitting Florida on Thursday.

Criswell said local officials “already have some idea” of how they would use Raymond James if the storm strikes the area. But she emphasized that residents should follow evacuation orders if needed.