A sold-out room, a huge stage show and multiple ticket-sale Web sites combined to create a logistical nightmare on Feb. 16 at the Roanoke Civic Center.

About 150 people who bought floor-seat tickets for the Keith Urban/Carrie Underwood concert wound up elsewhere in the building. Some had to stand through the show and were not happy about it. But a civic center spokeswoman said that facility employees did the best they could with a bad situation that required lots of last-minute work with the city fire marshal.

"We tried so hard to appease people, and we took a beating," said Robyn Schon, the venue's assistant director of facilities. "When they say you've got to roll with the punches, I literally know what they mean."

Lori Walker of Altavista traveled with friends to Roanoke for the concert, after purchasing tickets through ticketmaster.com. They thought they would have ninth-row, floor seats, Walker wrote in an e-mail. Instead, they learned when they arrived that their seats no longer existed. Their options: Bleachers that appeared to Walker to be behind the stage; standing room toward the back of the room; or refunds.

"I understand unexpected things happen, but how do you not have a seat when you've paid in advance for a seat?" Walker wrote, adding that she calls on the civic center "to create a better solution for this type of problem in the future."

Schon said she wishes it were that simple. The civic center has rarely, if ever, seen a stage show as huge as Urban's, she said. Customers bought tickets through tickets.com, which is affiliated with the civic center, and through Urban's site, which directed them to ticketmaster.com. Attendance was at capacity at 8,155, Schon said. Still, civic center employees believed they would be able to fit everyone inside.

And then the road crew arrived.

"The week before the show, the riggers here determined that the show was mammoth," Schon said. "We had to work with Urban's people to get them to downsize the show as much as they could without losing integrity."

The main stage was attached to a second, smaller stage by a 96-foot catwalk. Urban's video screen was too large for the civic center, but no one at the venue knew that before Urban's crew arrived, she said. Urban's crew was able to reduce the screen to about half its normal size, but it was still so large that the crew had to place it 19 feet in front of the rear wall to ensure safety -- typically, video screens are about 10 feet in front of the wall, she said.

That change cost the civic center five rows of seats in the back of the hall. Working with the fire marshal, the civic center placed 10 risers, two constructed on concert day, at the rear and far sides of the building. That took care of 65 seats for displaced concertgoers, Schon said.

The surprises kept coming. Urban's crew began placing barricades around the smaller stage, and the equipment they were using blocked civic center employees from placing chairs on the floor. But Urban's crew was friendly and helpful, Schon said.

"They were really great to work with," she said. "Roanoke's obviously a viable market for his music. They understood that. Then the question became, 'How can we make this work? How can we get the customers in safely and get them satisfied.'

"Obviously, we did not get them all satisfied. ... We did the best we could with a sticky situation," Schon said.

The civic center opened seating at the sides of the stage. Schon said that the seats weren't perfect, but they provided views of most of the stage. She said that at least 60 people found spots to stand where they did not block the exits.

She said that box office employees called every ticket holder who would be affected by the changes, if their phone numbers were available.

"They had to leave messages on quite a few, but they were able to reach a good majority of them," she said. "I don't know how much more direct we can get than that."

Walker, who had traveled with her friends from Altavista, said that neither she nor her friends received any word of what they would face once they arrived at the show. They got their tickets through ticketmaster.com; the civic center uses tickets.com.

If ticket buyers went through Ticketmaster, which was selling fan club tickets, or another ticketing service, the civic center did not have their contact information, Schon said.

Walker said they chose to get refunds, instead of trading their tickets for seats at the rear of the stage.

"Long ago, we had seats up there before, and we couldn't see anything," Walker said in a phone interview. For her, the Urban show glitch "wasn't handled well at all." Schon said that she thinks the civic center issued 47 refunds.

Walker suggested that the civic center notify the public of such problems through media outlets. She said such notice still would fall short of reaching everyone affected, but it would be an improvement on that night's problems.

Schon said that if the civic center had been aware of the dimensions involved, it would've reduced capacity well in advance. But she does not blame Urban's touring machine.

"No one's at fault here," she said. "We can't point a finger either way."

In the end, most in the audience were happy. Both Urban and Underwood received a huge, sustained welcome from the crowd.

"As I walked out of the arena after the final encore and the lights were on, there was Urban on the runway high-fiving fans," R.J. Gibson, of Salem, wrote in an e-mail soon after the show. "I've been going to shows for 30 years and I've NEVER seen that from any band."