Collapse The day Stadium Southland came down
On September 18, 2010, Stadium Southland collapsed under the weight of snow. Ten years on, Logan Savory looks at how the province narrowly escaped a major tragedy and how Southland ended up with a better stadium.
On September 18 each year, Keiran Fahy pours himself a drink and ponders his good fortune. He thinks back to the day he narrowly escaped death. He reflects on how Southland avoided amajor tragedy by amatter of 10 or so minutes.
On that Saturday in 2010, Fahy spent the morning at Stadium Southland in Invercargill helping a group of young tennis players.
The coaching session was meant to continue until noon. Fahy and three other coaches planned to stick around for a hit themselves.
As Fahy helped fine-tune the junior tennis players’ doubles skills, snow fell heavily outside.
Parents of children from outlying parts of Southland raised concerns about getting home because of the worsening road conditions.
A decision was made to cut the session short. The planned hitaround for the coaches was also scrapped.
Fahy headed for a shower, while the others started to make their way out of the stadium.
That is when the devastation unfolded.
For Southlanders, it has become a ‘‘where were you when ...?’’ type of moment.
The stadium – home to the champion Southern Sting and the Southland Sharks – collapsed under the weight of Southland’s heaviest snowstorm in 50 years.
An estimated 600 tonnes of snow were sitting on the roof when it caved in.
One of the few parts of the venue still standing was the changing room where Fahy was showering.
He was effectively immersed in a concrete bunker protecting him from the destruction outside those changing room doors.
Fahy heard a loud noise but it was the shaking that hammered home that somethingmajor had happened.
‘‘I was naked, so I had to get myself geared up and clothed. When Iwalked out of the door of the changing rooms itwas open spaces, basically.’’
He emerged to find sky where a roof once covered the community courts area, the area where those tennis players had just been playing.
With his tennis bag flung over his shoulder, Fahy made his way out of the crushed building.
He was met by stadium employee Brad Sycamore, who was in the reception area and urged Fahy to get out quickly.
Soon after the collapse, a tennis official advised Sycamore that it was only Fahy whowas unaccounted for.
Ten years on, Sycamore remembers vividly the moment Fahy emerged from the damage without a scratch. He calmly walked towards the front door to the stadium.
‘‘You should have seen him walk out, he was looking up and down wondering what was going on, and we were yelling at him, telling him to get out.
‘‘He was pretty casual.’’ Fahy concedes it was not until later that day that the enormity of what he had escaped hit home.
‘‘Certainly for a period afterward I was very conscious of anything thatwas shaking around me. Even inmy office, if a big truck came down the road you could feel a bit of the jiggle and you remember that sensation.’’
Sycamore had his own similar experience.
‘‘That day I thought: ‘the stadium has collapsed, that’s weird’. The next day I thought: ‘geez, I potentially nearly died’. It got a bit real.
‘‘The next week Iwent and had a coffee with the stadium guys, they were next door in the velodrome and there was a clap of thunder. Apparently Iwent white as a ghost.’’
Fahy has few doubts that if he and the other three tennis coaches had stayed on for their planned hitup that day theywould have been killed.
And it would have been even worse had the roof had collapsed moments earlier, he adds.
‘‘I was naked, so I had to get myself geared up and clothed. When I walked out of the door of the changing rooms it was open spaces basically.’’
Keiran Fahy
‘‘Twenty minutes beforehand there were still probably up to 20 people in that space where the roof came down, it would have been bad. We just thank our lucky stars, I suppose.
‘‘It is nice to have a drink on September 18 every year, I know that,’’ Fahy says.
ILT Stadium Southland general manager Nigel Skelt takes it one step further when pondering the magnitude of the disaster thatwas avoided.
He points out that seven days earlier, 2000 netballerswere playing at the venue. And seven days later, between 4000 and 5000 people were scheduled to attend a crafts show at the stadium.
Skelt says somebody,
Keiran Fahy in the men's changing room area at Stadium Southland where he was when the stadium roof collapsed around him on September 18, 2010.
somewhere, was sitting on their shoulder ensuring they had luck on their side that day.
‘‘Without being dramatic, it could have been carnage. Wewould not be sitting here talking about it like we are if there had been people in there.’’
It was Sycamore who made the 111 call soon after the roof caved in at noon. He heard a loud rumble followed by a host of alarms going off, alarms he had never heard before.
‘‘I had my ear to the phone and my handwas shaking,’’ he says about that 111 call.
The next task for Sycamore was a call to his brother, Ryan, the assets and operations manager at the stadium.
Ryan had been at the venue earlier thatmorning but left to give somebody a ride home.
Within minutes of the phone call from brother Brad, Ryan returned and found himself in crisis management mode.
It included having to make a unique call to his boss, Skelt.
For 20 years Skelt and Ryan Sycamore haveworked together at the stadium.
It was at that moment, just after noon, that Sycamore swore at Skelt for the first and only time.
Standing outside the mangled metal mess, Sycamore advised Skelt that their home away from home had been destroyed.
‘‘I rang [Nigel]. I swore at him over the phone,’’ Sycamore recalls.
‘‘Violently,’’ Skelt adds jokingly about the abrupt conversation.
Skelt took the call at his Invercargill homewith his wife and children in close proximity.
They say Skelt’s demeanour changed quickly and his face turned ash grey.
He quickly called Ray Harper. The stadium was Harper’s baby. It was Harper who was the driver in uniting the community to get the $10 million venue built in 2000.
Skelt told Harper he was on the way to pick him up.
From Harper’s place, en route to the stadium, they slid off the road because of the snow, narrowly missing some parked cars.
‘‘Itwas eerily silent in the car because we did not know what to expect. We simply did not know,’’ Skelt says.
They turned into the Tay St entrance to the stadium and caught the first glimpse of the mess.
Ryan Sycamore had already been inside with firefighters to kill the electricity and gas in the venue.
‘‘Honestly it felt like a bomb had gone off in there,’’ Sycamore says.
He walked into the building through the reception areawhich remained intact.
A sneak peek through some small windows into the community courts area of the building highlighted the enormity of the damage.
Rigging for lights was lying on the ground and a grandstand had tipped over, as did the climbing wall.
Soon after, Skelt and Harper stepped out of the car and the extent of the devastation quickly became a reality for them.
‘‘I will never forget, as long as I live, the expression on Ray’s face. Someone of his stature and character, his hands were up to his face, tears rolling down his face,’’ Skelt says.
‘‘He just crouched down and took a moment for himself and that was the most defining moment for me in my career to see his dream shattered in all the devastation that we saw.
‘‘He was broken. He had snapped.’’
Southland Indoor Leisure Centre Charitable Trust board chairman Acton Smith quickly joined Skelt and Harper on site.
For Smith, the collapse was personal. Not only had a building, owned by a trust he led, collapsed, he had familywho narrowly escaped death in it.
Smith had been notified of the disaster by son Jason, moments after it happened.
Jasonwas one of the tennis coaches at the venue, and he also had grandchildren in the community court areamoments before the roof caved in.
‘‘They had literally just walked out of the stadium into the foyer and the doors into the community courts blew open behind them. It was extremely personal, very personal for me. It was quite a shock,’’ Smith senior says.
Jasonwas not aware one of his daughters had gone outside to play in the snow at the time the roof came down.
For amoment they were unaware where she was until she was located outside.
‘‘They were very relieved. We are very lucky, Invercargill dodged a bullet,’’ Acton Smith says.
Soon after arriving, Smith started to divvy up some pressing tasks.
Skeltwas told to take care of the media duties, while Smith agreed to cover off the ‘‘political’’ side of the disaster.
‘‘I don’t know that I got the best straw on that particular day,’’ Skelt jokes about his media duties.
‘‘About midnight I had donemy last radio interview. I had done about 80-something media interviews that day.’’
How did it go down?
Amatter of hours after the stadium collapsed, the finger-pointing started.
People scratched their heads wondering how a 10-year-old building could cave in like someone had stood on an aluminium can.
The Southland Indoor Leisure Centre Charitable Trustwas formed in 1997 and it owned the stadium, which opened inMay 2000.
Invercargill-based Tony Major was enlisted as the design engineer for the build.
The Invercargill City Council is a stadium funding partner, and was also responsible for separate regulatory duties through the building process.
Just a couple of days after the collapse, Invercargillmayor Tim Shadbolt told media there had been prior concerns about the stadium’s structural soundness because the roof was too flat.
He also called for an investigation.
Shadbolt’s comments irked some in Southland, particularly the management of the stadium.
Skelt, at the time, dismissed Shadbolt’s claims.
Ten years on the mayor stands by his comments.
‘‘You can’t just sweep something like that under the carpet,’’ Shadbolt says.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment report revealed the roof caved in due to the heavy snowfall and defects in the construction of the steel tube trusses.
The report also highlighted concerns about areas of the stadium that involved design and construction modifications and welding on site.
It found the collapse is likely to have started by the compression failure of the defectivemid-span top cord splice in one of the roof trusses over the eastern end of the community courts.
It then progressed through other roof trusses. The spine trusses then fell to the ground as the two western-most support columns collapsed.
Welds failed and strengthening plates peeled away on some roof trusses.
In 2012, Noel Fitzgerald, the owner of the now-defunct Aorangi Steel, which undertook the welding, defended his company’s work on Stadium Southland.
‘‘They can’t turn around and say it was thewelding . . . that’s bulls… . The only reason the welding failedwas under-designed from the start. If it isn’t designed properly, one thing will go and the rest will follow.’’
AHigh Court ruling in 2015 pointed to engineer Tony Major as being 90 per cent responsible. The city council was ruled as being 10 per cent responsible.
Major failed to ensure roofing work completed in 2000 complied with the building code, the judge said.
The city council was regarded as liable because it signed off on the work.
Four years after the collapse, the Institution of Professional Engineers New Zealand [IPENZ] expelledMajor from its membership.
In August 2015, after the High Court judgment, Major released a statement in which he apologised saying the monitoring of the work was below the professional standards expected of him.
‘‘Unfortunately [I] relied on the professionalism and workmanship of the parties responsible for the fabrication and construction of the structural elements of the stadium. This trust was misplaced.’’
Ten years on from the stadium collapse, Major says he has no desire to reflect publicly on his part in such a significant moment in Southland’s history.
He declined to speak to Stuff. ‘‘Itwould open too many wounds around the town,’’ he says.
In 2012, the Department of Building andHousing
referred the
investigation’s findings to police but no charges were laid.
Police did not find any evidence of criminal liability.
Shadbolt is surprised that nobody has been made criminally liable.
He expected that the Christchurch earthquakesmight have shuffled the Stadium Southland situation down the queue in terms of priorities.
In 2015, the High Court awarded the stadium’s insurers $17m in damages, a bill to be split between Major and the city council.
WithMajor unable to pay his 90 per cent share, the burden initially fell on the council’s insurers, Riskpool.
But through the council, Riskpool appealed the decision.
The matter was sent to the Supreme Court and this was where questions began over the stadium owner’s role in the collapse.
It was revealed in the Supreme Court that four years before the collapse, the stadium trust board raised concerns about the impact a heavy snow dumpmight have on the roof.
The court found that in 2006 Acton Smith, in a letter to peer reviewer Harris Foster Consulting director Maurice Harris, said the trust board had become increasingly concerned at the movement occurring in the stadium’s roofline.
Two months later Harris responded.
He suggested the design ensured the strength of the trusses was adequate, although he advised the trust to investigate.
Harris cited six recommendations, including inspecting trusswelds for fatigue.
The court was told those inspections never took place and it ruled that the trust had contributed to the collapse of the stadium roof because of that.
The stadium trust was ordered to repay $16m to the city council, or its insurance company to be more precise.
Smith felt the talk of that 2006 letter was
something of a ‘‘red herring’’.
‘‘Therewas no effort by anyone on the trust to undermine the standards of anything, it was never the case, ever. We were not prepared to compromise,’’ Smith says.
He recalls reading an article in 2006 about a stadium that had collapsed under a heavy snow load in Europe.
The article hewas alluding to was in relation to the collapse of the Katowice Trade Hall in Poland in February that year.
It resulted in 65 deaths and 170 injuries.
Smith remembers sending the letter to check how Stadium Southland would fare in a similar situation.
He says the trust board was concerned but all the points raised were checked off by the engineers and they assured them everything was correct.
Smith acknowledges some of those assuranceswere verbal and not in writing.
‘‘We were happywith the responses we had received.
‘‘I think in that sense itwas a bit of a red herring, in my opinion. Because we as trustees had raised the issue following what I had read.
‘‘Could we have done anything differently? I don’t know. Short of having a third peer review of the engineering standards that were there.’’
Smith concedes the aftermath of the collapse was a difficult time.
‘‘As trustees, we are not engineers. We do rely on the expert opinion of the people that work with us.’’
Ten years and two court cases later, just who was at fault for the collapse of the stadium remains blurred.
The engineers stand by the initial design, and those who constructed the building also back their workmanship.
Smith says the ‘‘freak’’ snowstorm should not be underestimated in all of the fingerpointing.
The saga effectively ended up being a battle between insurance companies around who should pay.
It cost Invercargill ratepayers just $15,000, the excesswith its insurance company.
What we do know is the stadium collapse prompted some thinking within the construction industry.
Building requirements were more stringent when the MBIE reportwas released in 2012 than they were in 1999 when the stadium was built.
MBIE points to the fact snowloading standards were raised in 2008 because of a better understanding of how buildings respond to heavy snow loads.
However, in 2012, as a result of the stadium collapse two years earlier, the Department of Building and Housing encouraged building
owners to check long span (over 20 metres) steel structures for any of the defects identified by the Stadium Southland investigation.
This included any potential vulnerability of the structure from extraordinary loading from snow, wind, or an earthquake event.
‘‘The collapse, and the subsequent Canterbury earthquakes, also led to a better process being developed for conducting investigations, including the establishment of the Building Systems Assurance investigations team,’’ a statement from MBIE says.
The rebuild
The mourning lasted just three days for Nigel Skelt and co after the collapse.
Within seven days an insurance claim payout had been ticked off. Within 10 days a new wooden floor had been ordered from Singapore. The arrival of the floor ensured the Sting and Sharks professional sporting franchises could continue to play at the adjacent SIT Velodrome.
As broken as Harper was after seeing his dream brought to the ground, Skelt says Harper’s strong character quickly re-emerged. As did that of Acton Smith. After three days of disbelief, Harper called Skelt and others together for a meeting at his McMaster St home.
Over scones baked by Harper’s wife, Natalie, Harper told them they would rebuild the stadium and they would do it in 15 months.
‘‘That echoedwith me for the next four years, 22 days, and 12 minutes,’’ Skelt says.
Skelt followed Harper’s lead and came up with the ‘‘Game on 2012’’ marketing slogan.
If Skelt had his time again, it is a slogan he would not run with.
‘‘We were so excited, we had a countdown clock, we had T-shirts made, wewere ring-a-ding-ding here comes 2012. It was all over the vans, everybody was talking 2012 and it ended up being 2014.’’
Between the decision to rebuild and the actual rebuild there was a major earthquake in Christchurch.
The devastation it caused in the city changed the landscape of the construction industry.
The planned $20m stadium rebuild turned out to be a $43m project, Skelt says.
The fundraising drive prompted another slogan that Skelt now concedes he would also ditch if he had his time again.
That sloganwas ‘‘Hero or Zero’’. It effectively asked Southlanders whether they wanted to dream big by building a new ‘‘world-class’’ stadium or settle for amore basic $20m to $25m option which was what was received from the insurance payout.
‘‘We coped a lot of flak around the zero or hero theme. Look, it was
a poor analogy, there was a challenge around the spend.
‘‘But we all saw this opportunity, while we were down, we were not out.’’
The stadium trust literally rattled the tin in Southland and Southlanders obliged.
Individuals, families, and corporates backed the fundraising drive, and amajor leg-up came from the likes of the Invercargill Licensing Trust, Community Trust South and the city council.
Then-primeminister John Key was handed the honour of officially opening the rebuilt Stadium Southland in 2014.
For the record, Key missed all four basketball shots he attempted during the opening but he did prompt the applause of stadium bosses after announcing the government would put $2m towards a then $5m shortfall of the stadium rebuild.
Harper died in 2019. He had been proud that the stadium he helped build, and then rebuild, remains one of Invercargill’s most important assets. His funeral was fittingly held on centre court with mourners watching on from the stand that was named after him.
Ten years on from the collapse, and six years on from the rebuild, Southland now has a debt-free indoor stadium.
Skelt and Sycamore both say that as a result of the collapse, the region has also ended up with a much better venue.
The stadium was initially built in 2000 and Sycamore pointed out they spent 10 years figuring out what was wrong with it, in terms of layout etc.
The rebuild provided a unique opportunity to correct those flaws, Sycamore says.
‘‘It is like a second marriage,’’ Skelt jokes.
‘‘We looked at our budget and worked out what we could or couldn’t do. But this new building has stood the test of time, it is still before its time, this building.
‘‘There is no other building – credit to the project team – that is comparable in New Zealand.
‘‘It is multipurpose, multifunctional. We did everything ITwise that we could at the time.’’ And of course, it is stronger. The new stadium has twice as much steel as the original building and piling is buried 15m deep and a metre wide.
The roof height also increased from 14.5m to 18m, to provide stronger, deeper trusses.
The collapse occurred soon after celebrations to mark the stadium’s 10th anniversary.
On its 20th birthday on March 25 this year, the stadium doors closed as New Zealand went into Covid-19 lockdown.
‘‘I am not sure I want to be around for the 30th birthday,’’ Skelt says.
‘‘There was no effort by anyone on the trust to undermine the standards of anything, it was never the case, ever. We were not prepared to compromise.’’
Acton Smith
Southland Indoor Leisure Centre Charitable Trust board chairman