AZ plans to have a new roof on the AFAS stadium in Alkmaar by the start of the coming football season, CEO Robert Eenhoorn said at the club's New Year's reception. For the rest of this season, the Alkmaar team will play without a roof on their stadium.
"The aim is for the new stadium roof to be finished for the first matches of next season," Eenhoorn said. "Furthermore, the renovation plans will focus on comfort and experience."
The year 2019 was a busy one for the Netherlands, with elections and strikes, multiple high profile murders and shootings, and a summer full of heat records, severe storms and poisonous caterpillars. Here follows a review of the top ten stories of this year.
AZ will be playing its league match against Ajax in its own stadium on Sunday. After inspecting the AFAS stadium, and advice from TNO, the municipality of Alkmaar decided to release the stadium in time for the match.
AZ will also replace the roof above the main stand of the AFAS stadium, the club announced on Tuesday. Investigation launched after part of the stadium's roof collapsed in a storm in August showed that this part of the stadium's roof is also unsafe.
The partial collapse of the AFAS Stadion roof earlier this month was caused by the downward force of heavy winds. The stadium, home of Alkmaar-based football club AZ, will now undergo a renovation in which roughly 75 percent of the roof will be renovated or replaced.
The Dutch Safety Board found two more fractures and two compromised places in the roof of the AFAS stadium in Alkmaar, the Safety Board said in an interim report. These fractures and suspected cracks may lead to parts of the remaining roof collapsing. "They represent an acute risk", the Safety Board said, NOS reports.
When the AFAS stadium in Alkmaar was built, the future installation of solar panels on its roof was not taken into account, Anna Lambrechts, commercial director of Sunprojects - the company that installed around 1,700 solar panels on the stadium's roof in 2015 - said in a video used as promotional material, AD reports.
The video was filmed four years ago. It was taken offline after the roof of the AZ stadium partially collapsed in a storm on Saturday.
A report raising concerns about fire safety and structural integrity of AFAS stadium that was released shortly before the new stadium opened in 2006, was ignored by the Alkmaar city council and office of mayor and aldermen, former alderman Victor Kloos said to De Stentor.
"We warned about it at the time. In the meantime, I have requested all documents, investigations and reports from that time from the municipality", party leader Kloos of OPA - currently the largest party in the Alkmaar city council - said to the newspaper.
The Dutch Safety Board launched an exploratory investigation into the partial collapse of the AFAS stadium's roof during a storm in Alkmaar on Saturday. Football team AZ is also conducting an independent investigation. The stadium is currently inaccessible, which means that AZ can play no home matches at the stadium for the time being, NU.nl reports.
One person was killed, and separately a portion of the AFAS Stadion roof collapsed as heavy winds gripped the Netherlands on Saturday. Wind gusts in IJmuiden, at the North Sea coast, even topped 104 kilometers per hour.
A bicyclist died at about 2:30 p.m. in Linschoten, Utrecht, when the heavy winds toppled a tree, which sent it crashing down on a bike path along the Haardijk. The tree struck the victim, a 58-year-old man from Lopik, a town 15 kilometers away from the accident.
