Over the past few years, there has been multiple reports decrying Australia’s poorly designed and built apartments.
Last year, there were several reports (here, here and here) about how cheap combustible cladding had been used to cover potentially thousands of buildings across Australia, which in November 2014 sent a Docklands building into a towering inferno.
The problem is so bad that Engineers Australia released a report in 2015 claiming that 85% of strata units built in New South Wales were defective on completion, whereas the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in Melbourne identified up to 50 Melbourne city towers as being high fire risks.
Back in February 2016, it was reported that some multi-storey buildings recently constructed across the ACT are so shoddy that they would be cheaper to demolish and rebuild than to repair.
Then in September, The SMH reported that a new 400-page review by former treasury secretary Michael Lambert found practices for ensuring apartment fire safety were “totally ineffectual” and had caused unsafe buildings to be approved.
And in April, The ABC published an article on the “dark side of the apartment boom”, which reported that defects have become widespread leaving owners with costly repair bills and/or drawn-out legal battles with builders.
Now you can add exploding glass balconies to the mix. From The Canberra Times:
A frightening series of “spontaneous” glass balcony explosions at Melbourne apartment buildings has highlighted the dangers of cheap and faulty construction products flooding into Australia.
Video footage obtained by Fairfax Media has captured two extraordinary explosions in recent months, where glass panels on the outside of an inner-city tower suddenly shattered.
The falling shards missed passing pedestrians by just a few metres.
The failures are suspected to be cases of spontaneous glass breakage linked to poor manufacturing. It is thought the balcony balustrades contain nickel sulfide, which can cause glass to fail when exposed to extreme temperature change, wind or other stresses.
It is also a startling example of growing issue of poor quality building materials making their way into Australia on shipping containers, unchecked, before being installed in homes and on buildings – in some cases threatening lives and property.
“It’s a huge problem and more than we know about it,” said the chief executive of the Australian Window Association, Tracey Gramlick.
Ms Gramlick said the prevalence of building products that did not meet Australian standards, combined with poor workmanship and installation, meant many buildings would have to undergo repairs in years to come…
A new concern is the presence of asbestos in construction materials, including plasterboard, that has been declared “asbestos free” by manufacturers in China.
Developers and builders have attempted to make out like bandits by selling/building as many apartments as possible in a short space of time to frenzied buyers (many of whom are foreigners). In the process, build and design quality has been thrown out the window. And Australia has been left with a legacy of tens-of-thousands of poorly designed and often shoddily-built apartments that have proliferated like weeds throughout our major cities.
