A BBC report includes a video showing the moment a piece of guttering broke away from the roof of Amazonia Stadium in Manaus, Brazil at which the England football team are due to face Costa Rica on 24 June in the World Cup.

This follows another recent accident at another stadium being built for the World Cup and coincidentally also scheduled to be used by Roy Hodgson’s men. The most recent death was suffered by a 55-year-old Portuguese national, Antonio Jose Pita Martins, who was killed while disassembling a crane as the piece of guttering fell on top of him.

The man is not the first person to die. In fact, he the third person to be killed whilst working at the stadium and the sixth overall to be killed while working on the 12 stadia being prepared for this year’s tournament.

According to the official FIFA deadline, the stadium should have completed at the end of last year, but the job is clearly behind schedule and as such workers are purported to be scrambling to finish their job. This will do nothing to inspire confidence in those who fear not only for the safety of the remaining people working on the stadia, but as to whether they will be completed in time and to the proper standards.

Causes of accidents while constructing roofs:

In industrial-size jobs like these, there is a number of potential health and safety risks including falling from the edge of the roof, through gaps in a partially-finished roof or through the liner panels or roof lights which are fragile can give way under adult human weight.

As seen in the case of Mr Martins, falling materials can be a cause of injury to people below, and the cause of roofs collapsing can be age, as in the case of London’s Apollo Theatre in December 2013, but in the case of the new stadia in Brazil, the cause is most likely to be inadequate workmanship.

DPR Roofing Leeds has over 20 years’ experience in roofing and considers itself at the very forefront of a number of roofing services. As such, DPR takes health and safety very seriously. For more information, or for a quotation, please ring 0113 335 0043.