Bad Reichenhall Ice Rink

At approximately 15:54 UTC on Monday 2 January 2006, the roof of the ice skating rink collapsed due to construction defects following heavy snowfall.

The accident provoked outrage in the town as it emerged that officials had halted the training session of an ice hockey team inside the rink due to fears that the wall could collapse.

However, as many meteorologists pointed out, the weather and snow conditions were not unusual for the time of the year as the town lies in a popular winter sport area of Southern Germany.

A modern sports hall had already been built in 1970 at a cost of over 2.2 million DM; Only a year later, the most ambitious project by far was the combined ice skating, tennis and swimming hall (15.4 million DM), which was unprecedented in the region in terms of the generosity of its execution and covered a catchment area far beyond the Traunstein area was aligned.

The hall served, among other things, the ice hockey club EAC Bad Reichenhall as a training and competition facility.

The hall was – with the exception of the area of the changing rooms and the restaurant – completely glazed from northwest to southwest, so from the inside you had a view of the surrounding mountains with Untersberg, Lattengebirge, Reiter Alm, Müllnerberg, Sonntagshorn as well as Zwiesel, Staufen and Fuderheuberg .

The building materials technologist Bernd Hillemeier (Technische Universität Berlin) analyzed samples of the wooden roof construction on behalf of the ZDF magazine Frontal21 .

The media criticized the legal and administrative burden of the building inspection authorities, which are largely not led by construction experts .

There were calls for a "construction TÜV ” for existing buildings based on the model of regular inspections of bridges and other engineering structures.

The ice rink in Rosenheim was temporarily closed at the beginning of February 2006 when suspicions arose that the same glue was used as in Bad Reichenhall.

In this context, the public prosecutor's office was accused by the defense attorneys and the ranks of the co-plaintiffs of having investigated one-sidedly in the direction of those planning and executing the case.

According to a witness statement on 12 June 2008, the city administration of Bad Reichenhall knew about the danger of their ice rink collapsing.

The board of directors of the ice hockey club said that they had been warned by phone half an hour before the collapse that training in the evening would have to be canceled.

On 18 November 2008, the designer of the roof was found guilty of negligent homicide by the regional court for violating the duty of care and sentenced to 18 months' suspended imprisonment.

In which 53% of those who voted were in favor of building a new ice rink and swimming pool on the site, while the city was planning a tourism college there.

In order to demonstrate the will of the majority of the population and to commemorate the victims of the collapse of the ice skating rink, the songwriter Hans Söllner, who had given a benefit concert in Reichenhall shortly after the accident for the benefit of the victims' relatives in the spring of 2006, organized from From 16 January to 10 February 2009 there was a sit-in on the site of the collapsed ice rink.

However, the campus is now located at the hotel management school after the university did not extend the leasehold agreement for the site of the former ice skating and swimming hall in 2013 due to insufficient capacity utilization.

In 2016 it became known that the Bavarian State Office for Weights and Measures, which was moving to Bad Reichenhall as part of a relocation of authorities, was to be rebuilt on the property.

The city of Bad Reichenhall then, in consultation with a small circle of relatives, privately commissioned the artist Karl-Martin Hartmann .

On 2 January 2016 at 3:54 p.m., the time of the tragic accident, in the presence of the mayor of Bad Reichenhall, Herbert Lackner, the relatives gathered at the memorial made of colorful glass steles and remembered the 15 people who were killed in the accident.Following the short, private memorial service, an ecumenical service was held in the Church of St. Zeno.