Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

The news has been full of chaos caused by snow. It must however be said that the snow we had in Birmingham and further South, in the whole scheme of things is fairly modest. Even back up in Scotland I would see these sort of snow falls two to three times per year and there would be little fuss.

In many areas however snowfall can be quite extreme and needs to be dealt with. Snow sitting on roofs can exert considerable forces and have in recent years caused failures. Typically these have been in large, flat roofed structures such as sports centres. An infamous case was in Katowice Poland in which 65 people died in 2006. The cause of this was a poorly designed and maintained roof, coupled to a build up of snow exerting large forces on the roof structure. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katowice_Trade_Hall_roof_collapse

In many countries building regulations specify snow loading allowance which designers must adhere to. Eg. Wisconsin in the US, an area used to large amounts of snow.