BC Place roof collapses!

I woke up this morning to Carol telling me that it was snowing. Looking outside I saw that she wasn’t kidding. A wet and heavy snowfall that’s definitely sticking. Carol’s working at the mall of the dead tonight and I’ve been thinking picking her up is not going to be much fun at all.

I sat down to tinker with this website some more and got and MSN Message from Mark of the Hollywood North Report leading me to a news story. Here’s what it said:

VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – The roof of BC Place has collapsed.

Callers to News1130 describe that it looked like a panel of the inflatable roof ‘blew off’, which led to the entire roof to cave inwards.

According to the BC Place website, there were no events scheduled to take place under the dome this weekend.

My response? “Holy shit!”

Mark then sent me some pictures as well. Here they are (I captioned the after photo and found the before through a Google search):

I’m thinking the title of this post should have been “Vancouver landmark goes BOOM” but I’ll stick with what I have.

I’m sure there will be more photos. I’ll post them as I get them. If the weather wasn’t so crappy I would go take some of my own. If the snow is gone by tomorrow I will.

UPDATE [2:10 PM]: Here’s a Vancouver Sun story with a great picture of the tear in the roof.

UPDATE [3:12 PM]: Update from CBC

UPDATE [4:17 PM]: News 1130’s web site has more information.

UPDATE [4:32 PM]: Three videos from Gamegoof of the roof before, during and after the collapse after the jump.

Before collapse video

During collapse video. The sound of what I think is the metal skeleton of the roof buckling is creepy.

After collapse video