The 20,000-seat enlarged stadium opened to overwhelmingly positive reviews, with the exception of the plumbing. In an unlikely and almost unimaginable scenario, low water pressure led to the stadium's concourses being flooded.
The trouble started after a valve on one of the two large water lines that supply the stadium was inadvertently left closed. When fans arrived for the game, the capacity of the one remaining water line quickly became overwhelmed by demand from bathrooms and concession stands. With so little pressure, many concession stands had to stop selling beverages, although you could still buy a souvenir cup for $2 and get ice cubes for free.
The more serious concern was the toilets. Toilets in commercial buildings operate with a burst of water that is cut off when a mechanism senses water pressure rebuilding after the flush. But with the water supply only half of what it should have been, there wasn't enough pressure to trigger the cut-off mechanism. One by one, toilets were flushed with the water just continuing to pour down into the bowls and from there into the sewers.
Maintenance crews, who were standing by in case opening-day glitches emerged, located the closed valve and opened it. Their hope was that the extra pressure would trigger the flush shut-offs. Unfortunately, by that time there were so many toilets running at once that the pressure was insufficient to trigger the mechanisms.
Compounding the problem, so much water was pouring down into the toilets that it eventually exceeded the capacity of the sewer lines. With nowhere downward to go, the water flowed up over rims of the bowls. All the maintenance crews could do was go around manually shutting off the pipes supplying water to the bathrooms.
The overflowing toilets not only flooded the bathrooms and concourse, but the overload on the sewer line led to back-ups in nearby Galvin Life Sciences Center and the Computer Center and Mathematics Building.
Tests conducted a few days later revealed that even if the second line had been open, the water pressure still might not have been enough to keep the plumbing operating properly. Among other measures, administrators decided to replace all 126 of the toilets in the original part of the stadium with the modern, high-pressure variety installed in the new section. The new kind use only 1.6 gallons per flush.