Crowd festivities can shake richter scale.

• Position: Sports Stadiums

With his team leading 34-30 in the final minutes of a National Football League wild card playoff game against the New Orleans Saints in 2011, Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch took a handoff and exploded down the sideline for a 67-yard touchdown. Odds are that, as Lynch was sealing the victory for the Seahawks against the defending Super Bowl champions, nobody in the stands was worried about the structural soundness of the stadium.

Sitting a few thousand miles away on a tiny island at North Tonawanda, N.Y., just outside of Niagara Falls, Douglas R Taylor, CEO of Taylor Devices, no doubt looked at Lynch's run through a different lens than most Seahawks fans that day. Taylor's daily job involves controlling and stopping the movement of masses. No, he is not a linebacker; he is an engineer, and his company manufactures seismic dampers that protect structures during such events as earthquakes and high winds.

As Lynch rumbled for a TD, something else was rumbling in Seattle that day. Lynch's run led to such a frenzy in the stands that jumping fans caused a 1.0 earthquake to register at the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. Lynch helped set off seismic alarms again in 2014 on touchdown run, and football fans of another sort on the other side of the pond got into the act earlier this year, causing what amounted to a 1.0 earthquake in Spain in celebration of a victory by FC Barcelona.

Taylor's firm was not involved in the construction of either facility in Seattle or Barcelona, but it was heavily involved with BC Place, a new stadium in Vancouver, Canada, and Washington's Safeco Field, the retractable-roof stadium that serves as the home of the Seattle Mariners.

"Those who are going to sporting events should be made aware that technology already exists to protect a structure and its occupants during wind and seismic events," Taylor says. "My hope is that fans' biggest worry is the score of the game and not whether the stands around them are going to collapse."

Of Major League Baseball's 30 stadiums, 18 were built in 1995 or later, with five of those opening in the past decade. When the 2017 NFL season begins, 10 of...