KT stadium collapse: Where does the buck stop?

All parties contributed to the collapse of the roof of the RM270 million Kuala Terengganu stadium last June – but no single party was found to be totally responsible.

Or at least that’s what the official investigation report on the collapse says.

The principal architect, Raja Kamarul Bahrin Shah Raja Ahmad of Senibahri Architect, was reported as saying he was never involved in the detailed structural design or supervision of the stadium’s roof: he claims the main contractor had got another consultant to work on a detailed design of the roof. According to him, his engineers had expressed their concern on four occasions to the PWD over the flaws they discovered in the structure.

A notice has been issued to the contractor to repair the 50,000-seat Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin Stadium – the biggest in the East Coast – but no response so far.

So if no single party is totally responsible, where does the buck stop and who will bear the penalties for this sheer waste of public funds (probably derived from the state’s oil royalties – or whatever you call them)?

Meanwhile, the Terengganu government is unable to say if the stadium is safe even after the debris from the 2,500-tonne roof has been cleared as the impact of the collapse is not known.

What was the cause of the collapse of this new stadium, which was opened just over a year earlier? From a Bernama report, the following were identified:

• components used and work quality did not meet the specifications;
• design factor was not appropriate;
• roof was not constructed properly;
• quality control was not carried out at the project site;
• weak supervision during the construction process;
• lack of skilled workers;
• shortage of experts and experienced consultants;
• apathy of everyone involved.

In short, it appears that anything that could go wrong went wrong.

So where does the buck stop? Nowhere? And who will pick up the tab – the rakyat as usual?