ABSTRACT
The festive re-opening of the St Willibrordus church at Meldert-Lummen on May 1, 2013 was the end of the restoration campaign of the church, which began in 2003 at the appointment of the architect Peter Vos with a mission to formulate the restoration dossier. This chapter deals with the multi-disciplinary investigation of the causes of the tower collapse. Based on archaeological and building history data, combined with the evaluation of structural aspects during cleaning up of the tower debris, the damage phenomena as well as the collapse mechanism could be reconstructed. In 2006 Triconsult was asked to interpret the soil test results, and to search for the correlations between foundation investigations and observed crack patterns in the tower and in the church nave. The collected knowledge from the investigations of the collapse is the basis to concretize the appropriate concepts and technologies for the restoration and reconstruction.
