‘You don’t want a building to be a death trap’

Concerns are being raised about the insufficient number of building officers locally and the structural integrity of some buildings as Turkish officials issue arrest warrants for more than 100 contractors allegedly involved in illegal and shoddy construction in the aftermath of a massive earthquake.

Stakeholders are also urging the government to audit public buildings and retrofit them as needed, to satisfy the national building code.

The 7.8 magnitude quake which hit on February 6 brought down whole apartment blocks in Turkish cities and piled more devastation on millions of Syrians displaced by years of war. An estimated 45,000 people have been confirmed dead in both countries with hundreds of people still missing.

Spanish Town Mayor Norman Scott told The Sunday Gleaner that the St Catherine Municipal Corporation is very rigid in enforcing the building code.

“We have about four building officers, but for a parish that is so fast developing, we need about eight. We have a few that are contracted, but in total, we need about eight to 10 because we still have buildings being erected illegally,” he said.

Scott reasoned that the process to retain court orders to demolish dilapidated buildings in the parish is a challenging and lengthy one.

“In Spanish Town, we have some buildings that we would really love to demolish, but some fall under the Jamaica National Heritage Trust,” he said, as he referenced a building known as Manchester House, located at 32 King Street, which partially collapsed in May 2019 and for which the municipality is yet to get the go-ahead to demolish the remainder.

Scott told The Sunday Gleaner that the municipal corporation is “vigorously pursuing” four other buildings which need to be demolished as they could pose a threat to public safety.

His Clarendon Municipal Corporation counterpart, May Pen Mayor Winston Maragh, said that there are currently three building officers and two vacancies in that parish.

He shared that building officers were warned in a recent meeting to ensure that no shortcuts are taken under any plan approved by the corporation.

“We don’t want a similar situation happening here,” Maragh said, referencing the deadly earthquake. “It now means that we might have to employ somebody else who is a quality controller to go out there and to check on all these buildings that are being built.”

He, too, stressed the importance of examining aged buildings that may pose a threat to the safety of Jamaicans.

“We serve notices on dilapidated buildings and if we think it is also a fire hazard, we work with the fire department. We identified about three last year and we demolished them, so there are none now,” Maragh said.

The BBC has reported that for years, experts warned that many new buildings in Turkey were unsafe due to endemic corruption and problematic government policies.

“Those policies allowed so-called amnesties for contractors who swerved building regulations, in order to encourage a construction boom, including in earthquake-prone regions. Thousands of buildings collapsed during the earthquake, raising questions about whether the natural disaster’s impact was made worse by human failings,” the report read in part.

In 2018, a Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery study of Jamaica’s informal building sector found that construction quality was low and construction activity is gradual and is frequently done without permits, among other things.

“In many low-income neighbourhoods, word of mouth and personal recommendations are the de facto ‘licences’. Work is often unpermitted, houses are designed on the back of an envelope, and contracts between households and practitioners are sealed with a nod. Even in traditionally formal circles, such as large commercial and public properties, there are often elements that skirt the strictest application of the law,” a section of the report read.

The study recommended that carefully considered institutional training and licensing initiatives could increase compliance and improve construction quality in low-income communities.

High rises, heightened concerns

Architect and former head of the Caribbean School of Architecture, Dr Patricia Green, explained that in a proper building construction project, a contractor is not paid for the work undertaken if the design specifications are not followed and the building will not be given what is called “practical complete”.

She said if that system is “short-circuited”, meaning that there are no engineers and architects involved in the construction project, then “we have absolutely no idea what is going to happen”.

“I am calling for an audit. How many of these projects going up, specifically high-rise projects, are being undertaken by a competent professional team?” she asked.

In the Corporate Area, the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation (KSAMC) has been overseeing an explosion in the construction of high-rise residential and commercial structures in the Corporate Area, some of which have resulted in legal challenges by neighbours concerned about their privacy, safety and the dramatic change in the character of their neighbourhoods.

Green said that the KSAMC has a duty to ensure that buildings of a certain size and complexity are handled by qualified people.

“Are they (KSAMC) inspecting as they should and can they show the nation that it is being undertaken with satisfaction? There are people who are complaining that apartments are too close to their houses. You live next door to a four-storey house that is tipping on your boundary and an earthquake comes and you don’t know what is in the structure,” Green lamented.

Up to press time, the KSAMC had not responded to Sunday Gleaner questions submitted last week and efforts to reach Mayor Delroy Williams directly were unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, director of research at the Earthquake Unit at The University of the West Indies, Mona, Professor Simon Mitchell, underscored that Jamaica needs a new building code that is supported by geologists, seismologists and engineers.

“We have a building code, but it is not a modern building code. We are seeing an increasing number of high rises going up in the Kingston area and the question is now: To what specifications are they being built?” he questioned.

Mitchell said that such a revision would address future building concerns, but at present, efforts can be made to make existing buildings more resilient to earthquakes.

“You can actually look at how a building responds by putting seismometers in the top and the bottom and seeing how it shakes. What you can do is add extra steel and extra concrete to it and change how it wobbles,” he explained.

Mitchell said that Jamaica has not really been tested since the 1907 Kingston earthquake and now, more than ever, the country’s building stock must be examined to determine the risk level.

That January 1907 temblor resulted in more than 1,000 deaths in Kingston after buildings crumbled and fires swept the capital for four days. The fire brigade itself was destroyed by the earthquake so there was no means of fighting the outbreak, according to a Gleaner report on January 18, 1907.

Among the many victims was William Alexander Thwaites, the grandfather of the Reverend Ronald Thwaites.

“The story of the family is that he was standing outside his business place, which was on King Street (downtown Kingston), with another gentleman when the shock came. It pushed him out of the way, and that gentleman lost his leg, but my grandfather was killed. My family was unable to find his body and later learnt that he was buried among the unrecognisable here,” Thwaites said on the 110th anniversary of the disaster in 2017, referring to the Bumper Hall monument in Greenwich Town, Kingston.

“We haven’t had an earthquake for a good period of time. There must be stress built up in the rock across Jamaica so there will be an earthquake. It could be today, tomorrow, 10 days or 10 years from now. We can’t predict, but we must be ready for one. I wouldn’t like to see something that went on in Turkey happen in Jamaica if we got a seven-point-something magnitude earthquake close to Kingston,” Mitchell said last week.

Testing, boosting building strength

President of the Incorporated Masterbuilders Association of Jamaica (IMAJ), Lenworth Kelly, explained that though contractors execute, oversight should be provided by architects, engineers and the regulators – the respective municipal corporation.

“All the materials we use have some testing specifications. Steel and concrete have to meet strength tests. For a contractor to put up a shoddy building, it means that all the other parties are absent from the process. I will not dare say that it can’t happen here, but it is a serious breakdown in the systems that are in place for that to occur in Turkey,” he told The Sunday Gleaner.

However, a Sunday Gleaner exposé last December revealed that the National Compliance and Regulatory Authority (NCRA) had identified dozens of producers of substandard building blocks. A July 2022 internal assessment called for “urgent attention” after several manufacturers were found selling blocks failing to meet the minimum requirement for bearing load.

The assessment sampled concrete hollow blocks between February and June 2022. From 136 samples taken from 109 block manufacturers across 12 parishes, only 59 samples met the required minimum compressive strength, returning a non-compliance level of 57 per cent.

Disaster risk reduction expert Dr Barbara Carby said the issue is serious, noting that the true test of a building may come during stress events such as an earthquake.

The average compliance rate by block manufacturers in 2022 was 28 per cent, the NCRA revealed.

In 2015, the compliance rate was around 37 per cent.

Last week, Kelly reasoned that buildings are meant to preserve lives, noting that even with the massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey, there are buildings still standing and people were able to evacuate them safely.

“You don’t want any building to be a death trap for you,” he said, adding that he was concerned about the capacity of the KSAMC’s engineering staff to monitor the boom in construction in the Corporate Area.

“I am not satisfied that there is adequate monitoring on the side of the municipal corporation. We are having a construction boom and it is the same staff,” he said.

The IMAJ president said steps must be taken to reduce the vulnerability of Jamaica’s built environment, especially because earthquakes cannot be predicted.

“Government needs to start looking at public buildings. Do those buildings fit the code based on the age of some of them – hospitals, schools and ministry buildings? We can’t just assume that because the building is standing there that it meets the code. Some of them have no steel in them or very little and we have buildings that have deteriorated structurally but they are still occupied,” he bemoaned.

Further, Kelly revealed that in the purchase and sale of buildings, a valuator’s report is required but an engineer’s report is not mandatory.

He said that the IMAJ has long argued for the latter to form part of the process, as the value of a building is rooted in what the structure can resist, not the surface appearance.

“There should be a structural engineer’s report for every structure that will be sold unless it’s brand new. If it’s brand new, the design engineer or the regulator can sign off on it to say it was built in accordance with the design. Beyond a five or 10-year period, then an engineer’s report [should] be required,” Kelly recommended.

judana.murphy@gleanerjm.com