Living With " Risk " !

 On June 14, 2017, breaking news about a fire in London flashed around the world.  The name " Grenfell Towers " became infamous.  This seventy two story building suffered a cooking fire in a lower floor apartment and when heat broke the window the fire escaped and began to consume the outer cladding of the building.

The fire brigade arrived and residents were urged not to evacuate.  As the fire progressed upper floor residents could be seen looking out their windows. It became unstoppable and as the world watched Grenfell Towers become a flaming torch in the night sky.   Seventy-two residents lost their lives in that tragedy.

The enquiry that followed threw the spotlight on what was being used as the outer cladding on apartment buildings. A decorative sandwich comprising aluminium encasing a core of polyurethane was common on both renovated and new living towers.  This did not meet the relevant safety codes and this raised the question of who would pay for the consequent cost of removal and replacement ?

This form of building cladding was common in most world cities and it was quickly learned that several hundred were in Sydney. The cost could run to millions to rectify a city building and it quickly became apparent that this cost would fall on individual unit owners.  Despite threats from both councils and fire authorities, little progress has been achieved and four years after that London tragedy thousands of Sydney residents continued to live in buildings which could suffer a similar fate.

So far, we have been lucky.  The fire brigade has been able to contain several cladding fires before they raced out of control, but pressure is building to get removal commenced.  Now it is learned that  despite that four year time gap from the fire in London, the New South Wales government has still not settled on an approved replacement standard - and that is unlikely to eventuate until early 2021.

It seems likely that owners who have already taken steps to have unsafe cladding removed and replaced could find that the replacement fails to meet this new standard.  In most cases, individual owners have to seek a mortgage extension or raise thousands of dollars from their own pocket to fund this work and they could find that the action taken fails to meet the approved standard.

Cladding safety will obviously be a factor in the price level of apartments when owners of existing buildings offer to sell and it will have a big influence on the level of insurance that will apply.  Insurance is all about risk measurement, and obviously a building with unsafe cladding falls far short in that regard.

More to the point, thousands of New South Wales residents are living with an unacceptable fire risk.   We have many high rise towers that rise well above the ability of fire brigade ladders to reach the upper floors and a tragedy similar to that London fire is possible unless that dangerous cladding is removed.

Many people will question the wisdom of a four year delay in reaching a decision of what material should be used to replace this fire prone cladding.  It seems a valid reason to explain why so many buildings remain unsafe.  The people who devise the state building code do not seem rushed to provide sensible answers - and while that persists the danger remains !