Senior Researcher at Tilburg University, Civil Law Department, and Legal Counsel

In The Netherlands, construction safety is a highly social relevant topic. In the past decade, several construction accidents have taken place. The media paid a lot of attention to those accidents and some of them were investigated by the Dutch Safety Board.2 Recently, for example, the Dutch Safety Board published a research report on a roof collapse in 2011 during extension works at the stadium of FC Twente Football Club (Enschede, The Netherlands).3 According to this report, the roof under construction was not yet independently stable and further work on it was proceeding. The steel structure, that was meant to assure the roof’s stability, had not been fully completed. As a result, the roof structure was exposed to too much loading before it was sufficiently stable. That caused one of the roof beams to fail and initiated a total collapse of that part of the stadium. Other examples of construction accidents in The Netherlands are: the collapse of several intermediate floors of the B-Tower being built in Rotterdam in 20104; five balconies of a newly built apartment complex in Maastricht falling down in 2003; falling façade bricks in 2005 in several Dutch cities5; the collapse of the car park roof-top of an hotel in Tiel (2002); and the threat of collapse of apartments on the Bos and Lommerplein in Amsterdam (2006).