Problems of operation and maintenance of

stadiums structures

P. Yeremeyev
Prof. Dr.-Ing.
Central R&D Institute of Building Structures
named after V.A. Kucherenko
Moscow, Russia, eremeevpg@ramdler.ru
 Operation and maintenance of a facility means a
scope of activities ensuring safety of its structures
during the designed service life of the facility in
accordance with requirements of regulations and
design documents.

 Operation and maintenance of bearing structures shall

include works on controlling their technical
condition, supporting their performance capability
and proper functioning, and preparing to seasonal
operation and maintenance.
 In the process of design, one shall take into account
quickly growing operational requirements to
stadiums. The period of moral deterioration of a
sports facility may be limited to 30 years. It is
necessary to provide for possible upgrade of the
facility without its considerable reconstruction, in
particular, replacement of the equipment, taking into
account possible increase of loads in the process of
long operation, reconstruction, or upgrade of the
facility.
 The operation and maintenance mode of a sports
facility shall correspond to its intended purpose,
design characteristics and actual technical condition.

 The main demand placed to sports facilities is safety

of spectators, contestants, personnel and executives,
mass media persons, etc. Safety shall mean protection
of the facility and the spectators from different
external threats. These threats may result from crimes,
accidents, or human mistakes, such as erroneous
calculations in the process of design, operation and
maintenance, or management of the facility.
 Design and erection of facilities requires a
comprehensive approach towards choosing optimal
structural solutions and materials, production and
installation methods, operating conditions, and strict
control at all stages of the construction process.
Violation of one or several conditions mentioned
above will deteriorate the system safety and cause
accidents (failures).

 An accident shall mean destruction, damage of the

whole facility, its part or certain structural element, as
well as their exceedance of maximum permissible
deformations.
 According to the data provided by different authors,
we discovered the main causes of failures in
construction, which may obviously apply to sports
facilities as well. They are: design errors – 20 ÷ 55%,
violation of manufacturing and installation
technology – 17.5 ÷ 53%, wrong operation and
maintenance – 5% ÷ 33%, low quality of materials –
6 ÷ 14.5%, incomplete regulations – up to 4%, other
causes and their combinations – up to 25%.
 The difference in the aforesaid values of the causes of
failures may be obviously explained by lack of the
statistical data, different methods and imperfection of
evaluation of the accidents causes, etc. However, a
big share of errors in design, construction and
operation is disturbing. Analysis of the causes of
destruction shows that in most cases catastrophic
situations result from the totality of several errors.
 Available data were generalized to identify some
main causes of the problem:
1. Growing volumes of construction, including the
construction of technically complex structures, which
increases the absolute number of failures while
relative figures are constant.
2. Development of technologies results in novel design
solutions and techniques, materials and construction
methods which gives rise to complex problems yet to
be resolved. Failures are brought about by individual
or combined unprecedented causes when even the
most fundamental principles of conventional building
design and construction practices are changing.
3. Ignorance, bad faith or negligence leading to
noncompliance with regulatory requirements, design
documentation and operating procedures, failures to fully
monitor activities throughout the design, construction and
acceptance stages, unwarrantedly tight deadlines for
design, manufacture and installation, even when
structures are technically complex.
4. Failure to use structures in accordance with the design
and regulatory documentation. Failure to conduct full
scope of instrumental monitoring whose results could be
used to assess actual bearing capacity of structures,
forecast the remaining life of the building and thus make
sound decisions on extending their safe operation periods.
 There are certain key conditions and measures
required to mitigate the risk of accidents (failures) in
construction and increase the reliability of technically
complex and unique facilities.

1. Theoretical and experimental research of new

building materials and structural forms; improving
the quality of design.
2. Development and improvement of regulatory and
technical documentation, alignment with international
building codes.
3. Broad communication of discovered causes of
accidents and preventive measures to builders and
operators; use of accident cause analysis to amend
regulatory and design documentation.

4. Stricter monitoring throughout all design stages.

Unfortunately, design shortcomings in most cases
become obvious only after accidents.
5. Actual complex structure will inevitably differ from
design. Re-calculations taking into account the actual
geometry and characteristics of structural elements and
junctions are recommended. Results of such re-
calculations can be used to bring the computational
model as close to reality as possible and thus determine
with a better accuracy the structure’s proximity to its
limit state and its actual long-term reliability.
6. Stadia have higher criticality ratings. Therefore there
are additional requirements for the scope and types of
necessary surveys and design activities, for fabrication
and installation of structures and for acceptance and
operation procedures.
 According to a number of sources, the most common
types of accidents in sports facilities are collapses of
roofs (48%), stands (31%) and building envelopes
(21%). Below are some well-known accidents with
stadium roofs:

 In 2001, the roof of Mottaqi Stadium in Sari, Iran

collapsed due to a violation of its safe operation rules;
there were 25,000 fans in the stadium designed to
hold 15,000 people. Some people climbed the roof
which caved in under their weight killing two and
injuring 290 people.
 In 2002, two strong
typhoons hit Jeju
Province (South Korea).
The first one with a
maximum wind speed
of 28.7 m/s tore three
panels off the membrane roof of the Jeju World Cup
Stadium. The second typhoon with a maximum wind
speed of 40.8 m/s destroyed another three panels.

 Montreal’s Olympic Stadium was damaged for a similar

reason in 1988 and 1991 when aerodynamic instability
lead to a local rupture of its transformable Kevlar roof.
 In 2009, the roof of Stadium Southland in
Invercargill, New Zealand, collapsed. The roof
structure was a spatial truss system in the form of a
lattice. The collapse was caused by a combination of
factors including heavy snowfall with rain, design
shortcomings and installation defects (major
deviations from the design and building codes,
including welding defects), lack of competent
personnel to perform and supervise construction, etc.
 The roof of multi-purpose Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin
Stadium in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia, capable of
holding 50,000 people, collapsed under normal weather
conditions one year after its official opening in 2008.
The roof structure was a two-layer grid made of MERO
steel members. The collapse was accompanied by a long
loud sound similar to a jet engine noise. The
investigation committee’s report named design errors,
major deviations of bearing members from their design
positions during installation, lack of competent
supervision during construction, nonconformity of
materials and manufacturing to building codes as
possible causes of the accident.
 De Grolsch Veste Stadium in Enschede, Netherlands,
capable of holding 13,500 people was built in 1998.
In 2008, it was expanded to hold 24,000 spectators.
In 2010, work began to increase its capacity by more
than 30,000 people and install roof over the stands. In
the course of work, a large section of the roof
suddenly collapsed on the upper rows of the stands
behind the football goal on the south end of the
stadium like a house of cards with loud noise. The
accident killed two people and injured more than a
dozen. Loss of stability of two bearing trusses was
one of the identified causes.
 Strong snowfall collapsed part of the roof of Veltins-
Arena in Gelsenkirchen, Germany in 2010. Three
sections of fiberglass canvas were damaged.
 In 2010, the giant inflatable roof of the Metrodome
Stadium in Minnesota, USA, collapsed after the US
West was hit by blizzard with a snowfall of 50 cm
and temperature dropping down to -18°C. The Teflon
roof weighing more than 260 tonnes came down in a
matter of hours.
 In 2013, a small section
of the membrane roof
of Arena Fonte Nova
was ruptured.
The stadium capable of
holding 56,000 spectators
was built to host 2014 FIFA
World Cup games in Salvador, Brazil. The collapse
occurred due to an overload of a sagging section of
PTFE membrane by water accumulation after heavy rain.
 Any accident should be followed by investigation to
determine and analyze the cause or causes of failure,
make generalized conclusions taking into account the
type and frequency of accidents and propose
measures to prevent such accidents in the future. This
is necessary not only for legal reason, but also to
learn the lessons that could prevent repetition of
errors.
I thank for attention