Awaiting Action !

The Grenfell Tower disaster in London certainly shone the spotlight on high rise building safety but we had already had a taste of this danger with a fire at the Lacrosse building in Melbourne.  Flames raced up thirteen floors of this apartment building which was clad in this same aluminium and polyethylene sandwich.

Now the politicians are rowing about how this material should be controlled.   The Labor Opposition and the Property Council of Australia want it to be declared a prohibited import but this is being resisted by the Federal government.  It is also  being manufactured here in Australia so an import ban would not eradicate the risk, and it does have legitimate uses as the base for signage where  fire is not the problem.

There are two distinctly important problems that the tragic loss of eighty lives in London brought to the attention of the rest of the world.  There are 2500 low rise buildings in New South Wales and thousands more in Victoria clad in this material and firm action is needed to reduce that risk.   At the moment, this seems to remain in place because the responsibility issue has not been settled.

There is no doubt laws have been broken.  It is illegal to clad a building with a flammable material and building specification starts with the architect.  The company erecting the building is required to abide by the law, and before any apartment building can be legally occupied it has to be signed off by the relevant council as having legally met those standards.    The resident owners of such apartments have a very good case to expect the guilty parties to foot the rectification bill.

The cost we are looking at here is massive.   To remove this cladding and replace it could run to millions of dollars and if it is sheeted home to building companies and councils many would be forced into bankruptcy, and if it is not recoverable from those sources, the cost falls on individual apartment owners.  Not only will many be unable to pay, the impost would probably cause the valuation of affected buildings to fall to catastrophic  levels.

It is equally evident that we can not just continue to ignore the risk because if we do it is inevitable that eventually there will be serious loss of life as another Grenfell Tower type incident happens in Australia. That would be just too horrible to contemplate.

The other glaring need is to tighten the building code.  Originally, this aluminium faced product was perfectly safe, but the race for cost reduction saw a flammable core replacing the original inner material.   There is evident weakness in the building code that allowed this downgrading to pass unnoticed.

This has been a wake up call.  Individual building products need to pass a safety evaluation rather than a class of products receiving approval.  The entire architect/builder/council chain of supervision needs tightening if we are to eliminate similar disasters in the future.

The politicians need to do better than this knee jerk reaction to simply slap an import ban on a potentially dangerous product.  We need to settle this cost question of how the rectification bill is settled to allow apartment owners to get on with their lives.   Until we bite the bullet and get the courts to make decisions it is only a matter of time before fate puts an Australian fire horror on the nightly news !