By Luis Abarca
SYDNEY — Among all the national and international scandals which surround the Olympic movement, perhaps one of the worst is not yet widely known. With less than a year before the Olympic Games in Sydney, safety questions have been raised about the main stadium.
SOCOG and the NSW government have said nothing about this, but if information gathered by workers on the site is correct, it puts the 2000 Olympics at risk.
Tradespeople and others who worked on the stadium site say that the lustrous sporting colosseum has such grave structural faults that people's lives may be at risk. The problem, they say, is with the two temporary seating stands, one at the northern end and the other at the southern end of the main stadium. Each has a seating capacity of 15,000.
The top 10 of the 78 metal frame rows in each stand have, they say, been left without seats, reducing the capacity of each stand by 2000. Why, they ask, was the decision made at the very last minute not to put seating in the top 10 rows of each stand? The empty rows, which cover about 1500 square metres, are there for anyone to see when they visit the stadium.
According to workers at the site, to reach the initial target of 110,000 stadium seats after cancelling 4000 of them, the builder had to change the seat arrangement in the rest of the stadium, setting the podiums in the other stands much closer together than originally planned. Now, in certain sections of the stadium (not those reserved for the most expensive ticket holders), attendees will have to sit with their elbows tucked in close.
In October 1998, workers were instructed to drill holes in the metal frame which holds the seats from only the 11th row downwards, and to overlook the top 10 rows. When some of the 40 or so labourers who were assigned to install the seats queried these instructions, they received curt and evasive responses from the supervisors.
The workers surmised that perhaps the metal structure was not strong enough to support the spectators if all the seats were filled. The collapse of those stands, containing 13,000 people each, onto thousands more spectators seated directly below would be a catastrophe.
With the elimination of the 2000 seats, the total weight that the stands must bear when full has been reduced by around 140,000 kilograms (including the weight of the seats). But the remaining 68 rows of seats will weigh, when full, approximately 910,000 kilos.
According to an engineer consulted about this issue, usual safety standards would require that the weight of the metallic structure itself be at least three times that amount if each stand is to withstand a weight of approximately 4 million kilos when full of people. Does eliminating 140,000 kilos from a total of 4 million really ensure safety?
If doubts about the strength of the stands were significant enough to prompt the owners to eliminate 2000 seats, is it guaranteed that the stands will withstand Mexican waves, or excited spectators jumping up and down?
But there is a further, more serious, cause for concern.
Workers at the site maintain that when the gigantic cranes that placed the metallic roof onto the east and west stands gently released their hold on the structure, the stands sunk 65O mm, rather than the 65 mm that was expected, given the roof's weight.
When the incident was noted with disbelief by the crane operators and other workers present at the time, they were told by supervisors to keep the matter confidential.
The roof is made of 296-metre-long metallic arches (curved triangular steel trusses) covered with 10 by 10 metre polycarbonate tiles. It is possible that its weight was miscalculated. It is also possible that the flexibility and resistance of the materials, or their expansiveness, were miscalculated.
Because the drop in the structure when the roof was placed was 10 times that expected, the view of spectators occupying the highest rows in the east and west stands will be partly blocked by the lowest edge of the roof (the visibility problem, though not its cause, was reported in January 7 Sydney Morning Herald).
Why was this mistake not corrected? And how safe are the stands now? What does the designing architect say about this? And how much does the NSW Labor government, or SOCOG, or the International Olympics Committee know?
The immediate dilemma is what to do with 1500 square metres of bare metal on the highest and most visible part of both stands. The seats around the stadium form an undulating pattern of aquamarine and mauve, until you reach the upper sections of the two stands, where the bi-tonal harmony vanishes. How to hide this eyesore?
At the end of last year, options were considered for concealing or at least reducing the visibility of the error. Drink stalls, usually located inside sporting facilities, were discussed, as were booths for St John's Ambulance. The installation of public toilets was even suggested, along with plants or art works related to the Olympic movement.
It now seems that it has been decided by the powers that be to leave it as it is and hope that nobody wonders too hard about the empty spaces.
[Luis Abarca was employed as a labourer at the Olympics stadium site in 1998.]<|