PHILADELPHIA (CN) — As Roman Reigns aims to defend his WWE championship belt against "The American Nightmare" Cody Rhodes at WrestleMania 40 in Philadelphia this weekend, out-of-town ticketholders may face a nightmare of their own as road closures and severe weather forecasts threaten their arrival.
The Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau anticipates around 200,000 people will visit Philly this week for a series of WWE events scattered across the city from Thursday, April 4, to Monday, April 8. The festivities will culminate in a two-day pay-per-view event at Lincoln Financial Field.
That rise in visitors is expected to bring in a wave of cash. According to WWE, last year's WrestleMania generated $215 million and brought nearly 162,000 visitors to Los Angeles. This year, though, a myriad of forecasted weather events and infrastructure failures threaten to limit Philly's ability to rake in the millions.
To the city's west, strong wind gusts, hail and localized flash flooding are expected to stretch from northern Indiana to western Pennsylvania on Tuesday. To its south, forecasters suggest dangerous wind gusts could strike all the way from Wilmington, North Carolina, to southern New Jersey.
Meanwhile, to Philly's north, a powerful nor'easter could bring heavy rain and up to two feet of snowfall to New England and upstate New York.
That's just the weather. The the March 26 collapse of Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge slashed the I-695 in half, crippling alternate routes in the Baltimore area. Meanwhile, in Northeast Philadelphia, a portion of the I-95 will remain closed until Thursday after a semitruck struck a railway overpass near the Betsy Ross Bridge interchange Monday afternoon, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. While only northbound traffic has been shut down entirely for repairs, both north and south lanes saw significant delays Tuesday morning.
"Any time you have big events like that, you're going to get traffic," said Vikash Gayah, a civil engineering professor at Penn State. "When the infrastructure network is compromised and there's a key element missing, you're going to get some issues. So, I think there's the potential for a large impact."
Current estimates for Francis Scott Key Bridge rebuild span from 18 months to 10 years — long after WrestleMania concludes.
Additionally, while Pennsylvania Department of Transportation officials have not provided a specific time frame for the I-95 overpass repairs, Gayah suggested the undertaking would likely also continue beyond WrestleMania's end.
"These are very delicate and challenging projects, and they will take a significant amount of time," he said. "They are going to have large and long-term impacts."
While Gayah described the Key Bridge collapse as a freak accident, he noted that infrastructure issues similar to that of the I-95 overpass are far from uncommon, especially in the Keystone state.
Pennsylvania has the second most bridges in poor condition of any state, at 3,022, according to the Federal Highway Administration. Many of these bridges serve as critical infrastructure for the state's nearly 13 million residents, making their upkeep paramount.
Even still, the agencies tasked with maintaining key bridges face significant logistical issues, Gayah said.
"How do you do that while these bridges are in service?" he said. "It's not an easy problem."
"The more common type of incidents, where a bridge just deteriorates and leads to a negative outcome — as the infrastructure ages, that's going to become more likely unless we fix it," he added.
In the short term, little can be done about the road closures. Still, Gayah remains confident that city and state officials can redirect traffic with minimal delays.
"We have good people at [the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation] and the City of Philadelphia that are onboard and managing that traffic," he said. "I remember a few years ago, the Pope visited Philadelphia, and the level of planning and operations that went into that was significant. And so, I would imagine it's going to be the same thing [for WrestleMania]."
In the long term, though, Gayah stressed that additional funding for infrastructure maintenance to limit the chances of similar road closures occurring.
"This is not uncommon. It's going to happen," he said. "The hope is that it happens less frequently because we're investing in our infrastructure and taking care of it, which I think we can do."
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