Reference no: EM13536726

For Hartford civic center roof collapse disaster. What possible corrective actions could have been implemented to prevent this failure? explain in your own words.

This article might be helpful.

The engineers for the Hartford Arena depended on computer analysis to assess the safety of their design. Computers, however, are only as good as their programmer and tend to offer engineers a false sense of security. The roof design was extremely susceptible to buckling which was a mode of failure not considered by in that particular computer analysis and, therefore, left undiscovered (Shepherd and Frost, 1995). A more conventional roof design would have been much stronger. Instead of the cruciform shape of the rods, a tube or I-bar configuration would have been much more stable and less vulnerable to bending and twisting. Also, if the horizontal and diagonal members intersected at the same place it would have reduced the bending stresses in these members. Finally, the failure of a few members would not have triggered such a catastrophic collapse if the structure had been designed and built with more redundancy (Levy and Salvadori, 1992).

The Hartford Arena contract was divided into five subcontracts coordinated by a construction manager. Not only did this fragmentation allow mistakes to slip through the cracks, but it also left confusion over who was responsible for the project as a whole. Even though the architect recommended that a qualified structural engineer be hired to oversee the construction, the construction manager refused saying that it was a waste of money and that he would inspect the project himself. After the collapse he disclaimed all responsibility on the grounds that a design error had caused the collapse. He believed that he was only responsible for insuring that the design was constructed correctly and not the performance of the project. It is important for the responsibility for the integrity of the entire project to rest with one person. Fragmented responsibility leaves no one with a sense of or a real concern for how everything will work together making errors more likely to go undetected.

As a result of the construction manager's refusal to hire a structural engineer for the purpose of inspection, no one realized the structural implications of the bowing structures. This collapse illustrates the importance of having a structural engineer, especially the designer, perform the field inspection. The designer understands the structure that is being built and would best be able to recognize the warning signs of bad design and rectify them before they grow to catastrophic proportions.

Finally, the Hartford department of licenses and inspection did not require the project peer review of the arena design, which it usually did for projects of this magnitude. If a second opinion had been required the design deficiencies responsible for the arena's collapse probably would have been discovered. Peer reviews are an essential safety measure for all high capacity buildings and structures experimenting with new design techniques (Feld and Carper, 1997).