The top floors of Bloomington’s parking garages won’t be publicly accessible April 8, the day of the total solar eclipse.
The city says this is primarily for safety reasons, as officials expect around 300,000 visitors to come that day to Bloomington, which is in the path of totality.
Adam Wason, the city’s public works director, said staff will be stretched thin that day and won’t be able to manage potential large gatherings of people in parking garages.
“It comes down to a few different factors — mainly just, first and foremost, we don’t really do special events that are in parking garages,” Wason said. “From a staffing perspective, trying to manage large groups of people on the top decks of our parking garages just logistically was going to be quite the challenge for us.”
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Additionally, Wason said there are safety risks to large crowds of people gathering on the top floors.
He said a large enough congregation of people could exceed the combined weight of one car for every parking space on any of the garages’ top floors, based on information from a 2013 article by the International Parking Institute.
Wason added the city is not concerned about the garages’ structural integrity, but the buildings — and parking garages, generally — are not designed to handle the weight distribution of large crowds.
“That’s just another good reason for us to really rethink and make sure that we’re going to be restricting that access,” he said.
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Wason says there are still many venues to watch the eclipse from. He recommends Switchyard Park, Lake Lemon and the Indiana University Memorial Stadium, to name a few.
The city operates four parking garages. They are located at Seventh and Walnut streets, Morton Street, Fourth Street and the Trades District.
