POLAND: The owners of the collapsed exhibition hall in Poland have denied that their failure to remove snow caused Saturday's accident which has so far left 66 dead.
A company spokesman said any number of factors, including construction errors and faulty building material, could have caused the collapse of the six-year-old exhibition building in Katowice, 70 km west of Krakow.
"The snow was removed from the roof and was not the main cause of the accident," said Grzegorz Slyszyk, a company spokesman. However, with snow lying knee-deep all around, he declined to answer repeated questions from journalists about when the snow was last removed from the flat roof of the aluminium structure.
Mr Slyszyk contradicted eyewitness reports that some emergency doors were locked and blocked by heavy snow, pointing out that ambulances were able to pull up to the doors.
Locals in Katowice said the building was constructed in a hurry and one woman told a local radio station that the roof leaked on her stand during the first exhibition there.
However, the spokesman for the building’s owners said the structure had been inspected and certified last April.
There was silence and little sign of any rescue effort around the exhibition hall yesterday. Security guards stood at braziers, warming themselves in the minus 15 degree cold.
Locals wearing black mourning ribbons held a vigil outside the crumbled facade. In a nearby hotel, families sat with cold cups of coffee, calling police and friends for news of missing relatives in increasingly anxious tones.
More than 24 hours had passed since the roof over the Katowice exhibition hall collapsed with a terrifying crack of steel girders. Had it happened an hour earlier, organisers said it would have resulted in a "massacre".
Thousands of people were expected at the weekend exhibition in the 10,000-sqmhall, where over 120 exhibitors sold everything from pigeon speedometers to pigeon nutritional supplements.
One of the survivors, Jaap Koehoorn from the Netherlands, said he believed the collapse was caused by the drastic temperature differences outside and inside the hall. "It was minus 15 outside and so warm inside, 22 degrees or so."
President Lech Kaczynski has called for a national period of mourning. He said he would set up a fund of one million zloty (€240,000) for the families of victims and that the State would cover the cost of the funerals. Mr Kaczynski said a team of psychologists would be increased from 17 to 35 this morning.
The local police chief praised a police officer who died trying to rescue a young boy from the hall. International rescue teams in Katowice criticised what they saw as poor organisation and political interference in the rescue effort.
A German urban search and rescue team had arrived from Cologne with three tonnes of rescue equipment and five sniffer dogs but team leader Frank Schultes said the Polish authorities declined to use the equipment and had left them sitting around for eight hours.
"The Poles seem to have given up already," said Mr Schultes, just returned from the Pakistan earthquake rescue effort. He said people survived there 126 hours under the rubble.
"We got permission to come and drove 13 hours with 22 guys, now the Polish government said we cannot work here and we’re sitting around drinking tea," he said.
"In 43 missions in other countries, the only time we’ve ever had a problem like this was in Iran. It’s a political problem here. Mr Slyszyk, for the building’s owners, praised the quick response of the German rescue team, but "there was no need to take their help".