Effect of Construction Errors on the Snow-Induced Failure of a Tribune’s Columns and Roof

Abstract

This paper aims to present an investigation about the effect of construction errors on the snow-induced failure of tribune columns and roof. The structure, located in the town of Kalkandere in the province of Rize, Turkey, collapsed on January 3, 2016 and is considered as a case study. This low-sloped built variable-truss steel roof structure supported on reinforced concrete columns of 3.2 m covers a total of 626.46 m2 closed areas in plan. The roof of the tribune collapsed partially without any indication during first snowfall after construction, at midnight on a winter day, fortunately before the opening hours. The meteorological records and observations of local people are combined together to estimate the intensity of snow load in the region and it is compared with the code specified values. The snow load value is derived as 3.14 kN/m2, which is 4.19 times greater than the design value. A three-dimensional finite-element model of the existing steel tribune roof with reinforced concrete columns is generated for four cases considering project drawings and site investigations. The compressive strength of concrete is calculated as 13.50 MPa, the type of steel longitudinal and confinement bars is defined as S420. At the end of the study, it is shown that the reinforced concrete tribune structure with steel truss cantilever systems has enough stability, rigidity, and is located within the safety limits for Cases 1 and 3. The failures occurred during Cases 2 and 4. From the analyses, inadequate concrete strength was determined as a secondary parameter causing this failure. Also, it is indicated that the possible reasons for the collapse are some mistakes made in the design of connection details, incorrect arrangement of the structure, existence of short column, overlap regions between the rigid tribune blocks, and individual columns and construction workmanship errors.