Engineering Commons^™

Another Look At Hartford Civic Center Coliseum Collapse, Rachel Martin, Norbert J. Delatte

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

Only a few hours after five thousand basketball fans had left, the roof of the Hartford Civic Center Coliseum collapsed under a heavy snowfall. Fortunately, the arena was empty. The design of the space frame roof had been based on an innovative and extensive computer analysis. However, when deflections twice as great as those predicted by the computer analysis were observed during construction, the warning was ignored. Overconfidence in computer analysis results played a large part in this failure. A useful lesson from this case is that the computer is only an analytical tool and computed results must be checked …