If there can be any positive salvaged from the catastrophic and deadly London tower fire it is that authorities here in Australia have finally been galvanised to take action in relation to high-rise safety.
The fact that it took so many deaths for the issue to be taken seriously here at home is concerning given that we had our own warning in November 2014 with the Lacrosse apartment fire in Melbourne.
Thankfully no lives were lost in the Docklands fire, in which non-compliant aluminium cladding led to fire racing up the external walls of the 23-level tower in minutes.
Plenty of hearings, inquiries and reports followed but only in Victoria did all this talk translate into an audit of apartment buildings. Yet the material at the heart of the fire was known to have been used extensively in every State of Australia.
The Queensland Government has now proposed new laws giving the building regulator the power to force the removal of dangerous cladding while stopping short of a full review.
In NSW the Government is hurriedly assembling a “strike force” to make building owners replace non-compliant cladding, an urgency that appeared lacking last year when The Australian reported that 2500 high rise buildings in NSW could contain the cladding that caused the Lacrosse fire. Read more here: www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/state-politics/deadly-cladding-on-2500-sydney-buildings/news-story/23efd1460094f59187d0f29f4f0f7d91
Let’s just think for a moment about the enormity of this task, not to mention the complexity of finding out just what these buildings are made of. The many apartment owners and tenants right across Australia will be wondering what their next move should be. Sit and wait for the government or their local council to inspect their building? Take action themselves and commission their own inspection rather than join what could be a very long queue?
And what happens if an audit reveals that the apartment they bought in good faith, implicitly trusting that it complied with Australian building codes and standards, is indeed non-compliant. Who bears the cost of rectification? Is it the owner, or perhaps the developer, or the builder, or the certifying authority? The list of blame and responsibility is long and litigious.
The owners of the Lacrosse building are facing a $40 million repair and rectification bill and are saddled with apartments they can’t sell and can’t rent. Better than loss of life of course but potentially ruinous nonetheless.
A 2013 report from the Engineers’ Multi-Disciplinary Committee, presented in 2015, found that 85 per cent of strata units in NSW were defective on completion and that the “building system in NSW has broken down”. Of course not every defect is of a life threatening nature but there is a need to know that cannot be ignored. Read more here: http://bpb.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/public/Archive/BPActReviewDP_Engineers%20Australia%20Multi-Disciplinary%20Committee.pdf
​Newspapers have reported that the NSW government intends to set out “minimum standards of expertise for anyone conducting a fire safety inspection of a building”. Makes you wonder what standard of expertise we’ve been getting over the many years previous.
A forensic examination of many buildings in Australia, commercial as well as residential, may just open a Pandora’s Box of other problems and defects. It will take determination to ensure public safety remains the absolute priority.
What we need is a rational, sensible and universal approach to reassure property owners that their buildings are safe and if there are any identified with deficiencies that pose a risk to public safety, they are rectified without delay.