High Rise Safety !

It was a less than memorable Friday night for the hundred apartment owners who were served a notice at 9 pm telling them to collect their valuables and vacate the building.  Cracks in the walls of the underground car park were spreading and structural engineers thought it prudent to shut down this modern high rise apartment building in Sydney's south.

It brought back memories of the Opal Towers fiasco that had a similar outcome on Christmas eve.  But that was a brand new building and not all the apartments were then in use and the insurer was quick to pick up the tab for hotel and motel rooms for the night, and later subsidized costs for the weeks that owners were locked out as repair work made the building again safe.

This high rise was completed in 2008 and during the twelve years it had been occupied there were few problems.  Those cracks started to appear about the same time as another new tower block started construction next door.   The water table at Mascot is close to the surface and there is conjecture that excavations for a foundation next door might have something to do with this change in the buildings stability.  Emergency props have been installed in the underground car park while the engineers look for a solution.

Unfortunately, those hundred families that lived in Mascot Towers are now virtually homeless.  The defect insurance cover for new buildings is far less than twelve years, hence it raises the question of who pays for the necessary repairs  ?   There is also the possibility that the building may need to be demolished if a solution can not provide the level of safety needed.

Both Sydney and Melbourne have of necessity become high rise cities.  The population density destroyed that old concept of a free standing house on a quarter acre block and modern living has adapted to the " vertical village " concept.   More of us now live in an apartment in the sky and this news of building instability is a very unwelcome development.

To add to that concern, some apartment buildings have an external cladding similar to the material that resulted in the tragic Grenfell Tower fire in London in which over seventy residents died.  That cladding needs to be removed and replaced with a safer  product and once again the issue of " who pays " is retarding action.   Owners of apartments have a very real reason to question the safety of their investment.

This failure of two modern high rise buildings is reason for a review of our building codes to ensure that proper standards are maintained and it seems more attention needs to be directed at site suitability for high rise.   We also need to look at the laws that apply to the financing of high rise apartments in the money market.  If a high rise buildings fails, the apartment owners not only lose the investment they have paid for but the banks insist on them repaying the loan for its purchase.  Perhaps it is time to spread that risk factor more widely or demand insurance against building failure during the term of the loan.

These two failures this year show that all is not well in the building industry.   Considering that a home is usually the biggest financial venture in most people's lives both the integrity of the building and the means in which it is financed need an improved safety aspect.