🤠 Hold on to your hats! How the Houston Rodeo keeps your family safe when storms come through

HOUSTON – It’s a breezy opening day of the 2025 Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo! The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo closed nine rides due to high winds Tuesday afternoon.

On Tuesday morning, a line of strong storms moved through SE Texas, including over NRG Park. Wind gusts at nearby William P. Hobby Airport just south of downtown measured in at just under 40 miles per hour.

“Since it was this morning, it was just really stand by mode,” said Mike DeMarco, the Chief Show Operations Officer with the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. “Batten down the hatches. Let the system go through. Thank God it kind of mostly went north of us and we were able to track that and the severity was not as bad as we anticipated.”

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While the rain gave way to sunshine, the wind stuck around.

Gusts in the afternoon reached nearly 50 mph.

“I started to pray. I was like, God, please let the weather get sunny and let us have a good time,” said Krista Atwood. “Literally on the way, the sun was beaming. I was like, ‘Thank you, Lord.’”

It’s no secret that the carnival rides, food stands and games are all mobile structures.

So, how much can they withstand?

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Some of the weaker structures like tents might only be able to withstand winds of 40 or 50 miles per hour. Meanwhile, the larger tents, food trailers and even some rides can handle hurricane force winds.

Way before winds reach those speeds, there are thresholds in which crews will shut them down.

“I’ll just pick the Ferris wheel,” said DeMarco. “If we’re getting winds over 45 miles an hour, they’ll probably look at running the Ferris wheel, pulling people off to make sure that it’s safe. If we got winds in the 50 mile an hour plus, we would be evacuating people out from under tents.”

They collect data from a variety of resources, fed into their command center.

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This includes wind speeds, lightning strikes, radar, rain probabilities and more.

Even some of the rides have weather senors on them to feed back live data to the ride’s operators, RCS.

“We gather all that information and then start making decisions,” DeMarco explained.

These are decisions that can help keep you and your family safe.

“We just waited till the rain stopped,” said Tracy King. “We decided hopefully that means that we won’t have too much trouble parking and too many crowds.”

It’s a gamble that paid off for King and many others.