Premises Safety at Stadiums & Large Venues Webinar Series

This video was recorded from the live webinar on August 7, 2025.

Premises Safety at Stadiums, Arenas & Large Venues

Stadiums, arenas, and large venues host far more than sporting events—they’re also popular locations for concerts, shows, and other large gatherings. With high foot traffic and diverse uses, these venues present a range of premises liability risks, from slips and falls to ADA compliance issues.

In this 30-minute webinar, architect and premises safety expert Mark Sullivan will explore common design features, relevant codes and regulations, and the potential hazards that can lead to litigation.

Transcript Excerpt

Some of the building and life safety code aspects, whether they're large, medium, or small theaters, concert halls, arenas, stadium, they're all classified as assembly spaces in the code.
 
Assembly spaces are broken up into, say, five different categories, and they're used to tell architects how many people to expect to design for egressing out of the facility. There's one through five different types of assembly, but they're all treated the same in terms of code exceptions and and and code requirements that are specific to assembly spaces.
 
Some of the code exceptions that you'll find in that are specific are related to the aisle steps and and railing, and we'll get into that in a little bit. The older facilities, when we're doing these we're doing investigations, if it's an old, say, it's a historical facility like Wrigley Field or something or if it's your high school from 1950s, you know, built back in the 50s, they may be grandfathered to the code that was built when they were built, when they were constructed.
 
If they've been renovated or upgraded since then, that might bring that specific part or it might bring the entire facility up to modern code. So those are all things that we look at when we're looking at when we're investigating these type of these cases.
 
If you've worked on any types of falls on stairs, on premises liability cases, looking at the means of egress components - fire stairs are ones where the minimum rise is four inches, maximum is seven. The minimum tread depth is seven. We refer to them as seven eleven stairs, and they're the most common stair that we experience whether at home or in a business. What most people are used to feeling is a seven inch stair, around that that amount.
 
When you look at these arenas with their sight line restrictions and things, the code takes that into exception.
 
And in your access aisles, you can actually go up to about eight inches in the main seating floor. So that's something that you can feel. You know when you've come in and you experience a set of stairs that's greater than seven. And in any of these cases, dimensional uniformity is a huge factor in safety.

Featuring

Mark T. Sullivan, AIA, NCARB, CDT, CXLT

Architecture, Construction & Premises Safety Expert

Mark Sullivan is a Texas-based registered architect and construction administration professional with more than 25 years of practical experience. His architectural career began with single-family… read more.