Causes Of The Collapse Of Southland Stadium

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1. INTRODUCTION
This report deals with the causes of the collapse of the southland stadium and also how the collapse has been initiated. It also recommends some precautions to be taken during designing and construction of a structure in order to avoid similar type of failure in structures.
The Southland Stadium was located in the surrey park, Invercargill, New Zealand. It was an international sports complex and it provides an indoor facility for various sports and it also had five multipurpose community courts, two event courts, and seating for more than 2500 people, bar, lounge, kitchen and also had parking space for about 700 cars1. It covered an area of 9108 sq. meters.

Figure 1: Plan of the Southland stadium (Source: from www.finda.co.nz)
The roof of the stadium was a clear span over two large interlinked spaces (namely community courts and event courts whose dimensions were 96.35 × 36.6 meters and 46.1 × 39 meters respectively). Two spine trusses T10 & T11 were erected in between community courts and event courts, which were supported by the concrete columns (C13 to C16) are the key elements of the roof structure. The community court consists of nine trusses (T1 to T9) and out of these nine, five trusses were supported by the spine truss (T10) and the remaining trusses are supported by the framework of steel beams. These spine trusses supports an area of half of the event courts and one quarter half of the community courts2. The entire roof comprised of 0.55mm thick profiled metal sheet cladding supported on the cold formed steel purlins with two lines of purlin braces in each bay. These purlins were supported by the steel roof trusses which are fabricated from Rectangular hollow sections and square hol...

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...gs should not be opened to public until and unless it has been carefully examined and certified.
• Proper care should be taken while welding joints and it should be done by the skilled people under proper guidance.
• Columns and walls that support the long roof truss subjected to snow loadings should be of sufficient strength to resist transverse displacement under overloading conditions.
• Appropriate attention should be taken while making connections between different members.

CONCLUSION
While designing any building, one should design it according to the specific standard design codes and also while connecting all the structural members one should maintain proper attention. One should avoid on-site design modifications as much as possible before consulting a structural designer. By taking these necessary precautions, one can prevent the structure from collapse.

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