Now I am kinda curious about how heavy snow can get.
I live in a snow-less flat-roofed region and the load capacity seems to be ~1.5 kN/m² [1]. So, even the cheapest compliant (maybe I should be checking govt. docs for compliance values) building not designed for snowfall should be able to manage 15cm of rain/snow.
Well, that is much lower than the 1m of snow that I would expect building up in case it really snows and it could get higher considering the parapet walls tend to ~1m high.
Snow itself can get pretty heavy, but more risky I think is repeated melting and refreezing. You can wind up with a large mass of ice that can really fuck up a roof or overhang.
Well, I have seen drains clog up so bad that the parapets act like a bowl and capture the ~1m of water with the roof still staying mostly intact (although seepage would have greatly increased there), so something other than my calculations is holding up that roof.
So I guess one would have to rely on the melting-refreezing to break down the roof, considering that without the phenomenon, the ice would be pretty fluffy and light.
Now I am kinda curious about how heavy snow can get.
I live in a snow-less flat-roofed region and the load capacity seems to be ~1.5 kN/m² [1]. So, even the cheapest compliant (maybe I should be checking govt. docs for compliance values) building not designed for snowfall should be able to manage 15cm of rain/snow.
Well, that is much lower than the 1m of snow that I would expect building up in case it really snows and it could get higher considering the parapet walls tend to ~1m high.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/simply-supported-slabs-load-capacity-d_1803.html ↩︎
Snow itself can get pretty heavy, but more risky I think is repeated melting and refreezing. You can wind up with a large mass of ice that can really fuck up a roof or overhang.
Well, I have seen drains clog up so bad that the parapets act like a bowl and capture the ~1m of water with the roof still staying mostly intact (although seepage would have greatly increased there), so something other than my calculations is holding up that roof.
So I guess one would have to rely on the melting-refreezing to break down the roof, considering that without the phenomenon, the ice would be pretty fluffy and light.