Dave McCormick will never forget the day he saw sunlight coming through the roof at the Rogers Centre in Toronto.
“I’ve been working there for 15 years and I’ve never seen daylight come through the roof until Monday (April 16),” said the stadium’s engineering manager of the day after a mid-April ice storm that caused extensive damage across the Greater Toronto Area.
“I noticed when I was up there, there was already ice on the roof the size of a softball and it had already made a couple of punctures in the roof. We got off the roof because obviously something was going on.”
Shortly after he got back into the building, he was called down to the field and noticed water coming through the roof.
“We had, at this point, several tears in the roof all over,” McCormick said.
“We were standing around the short stop area looking up and I couldn’t believe it, there was already couple of spots where I could see daylight.”
McCormick likened the sounds he heard next to big booms. Ice from the CN Tower was falling onto the stadium’s roof.
“When you hear the bangs, you know it’s being dropped from above and then there was a noticeably louder one. We were looking up at it more, waiting for it to end and all the sudden I saw something I thought I’d never see — it blew through the roof in the outfield and the snow and ice fell down to the field with bits and pieces of the roof with it. Quite honestly we were all just speechless,” McCormick recalled.
“We had to regroup pretty quickly. Fortunately it happened very early in the morning and there was next to nobody in the stadium and no one on the field other than ourselves.”
Alarms went off as damage occurred to a sprinkler main and the area around an elevator shaft.
We’ve had ice come down before but nothing to the point where we’ve even thought about cancelling a game
— Dave McCormick
Rogers Centre
The first two phone calls went out to Dean-Chandler Roofing, which has been working on the roof since the building opened, and AJW Engineering, the structural consultants for the building. The roofing contractor started on the repairs as soon as it was safe to do so.
“Everything in the last couple days revolved around safety first and then fixing the issue as it would be allowed,” said McCormick.
“They patched the biggest hole and we took them off the roof. They reconvened the next morning and they have been up there every single day from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. (as of April 20). Now it’s the needle in the haystack game where they crawl through that roof inch by inch looking for any little perforation in it.”
McCormick added, “Even though the ice has stopped falling on our building, the conditions the last couple days have not been ideal up
there.
“I keep reminding them that anytime they feel that there could potentially be an issue, I want them off the roof in a minute.”
Engineers did a visual investigation on the steel that had been broken.
“They determined that yes, it is going to have to be fixed, but at this point it poses zero risk,” said McCormick.
“We’ve sent over as much information as we can about the structure of the roof to our consultants. They’re going to look at it and, like anything we do, they will help us develop a repair procedure for it as well, but at the moment it is 100 per cent structurally sound and it’s waterproofed again too.”
Crews spent the hours following the incident trying to keep people off the field and setting up a perimeter to keep people away from the northeast side of the building where the damage occurred. That’s when the decision was made to cancel the baseball game scheduled between the Blue Jays and the Kansas City Royals that day.
“We’ve had ice come down before but nothing to the point where we’ve even thought about cancelling a game,” McCormick said.
“We had to make some tough decisions internally. They were based primarily on the safety concerns of our staff and fans and we relocated that game to the next day, not even knowing if we were going to be able to play the next day.”
There were lessons learned from the incident, McCormick said.
“I’m quite sure when this is all said and done as businesses we’ll look around and see what we can do for next time because unfortunately, as long as there is a tall tower there, there’s always the possibility that this could happen again,” he stated.
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