Collapse of an industrial steel shed: A case study for basic errors in computational structural engineering and control procedures

Collapses that do not produce other than economic losses remain often unknown either to the public and to the community of engineers. The technical causes of any collapse deserve attention even if no scientific research is needed since they often show that design and control procedures and code provisions may fail in preventing errors both in the design and in the building phase of standard structural engineering. In this paper the collapse of an industrial steel shed, under a 10 cm layer of fresh snow, is discussed showing that its collapse resulted from a chain of errors, in the design phase, during its assemblage and in the final inspection and control phase.