Collapse of the roof of a football stadium

In the summer of 2011 the Dutch football club FC Twente was building an extension of their stadium De Grolsch Veste, to increase the capacity of the stadium. On July 7th 2011, during construction, the roof of the partially finished extension collapsed. As a result of this accident two workers were killed and nine were injured, a few of them critically.

After this accident an investigation was started, following a standard strategy for investigating structural incidents. After analysing the behaviour of the structure, combined with analysing the collapsed structure, possible scenario’s were investigated. The most likely scenario for the cause of the collapse was finally validated by finite element calculations.

The investigations led to the conclusion that the combination of a partially finished main bearing structure, in combination with almost all final permanent loads, had caused the collapse. The investigation has also shown that the used strategy for investigating structural incidents was very useful and resulted in well based conclusions.