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Structural Audits Of Buildings To Become A Norm Soon
Posted by Pradeep Sadanapalli | June 21, 2008 | 759 views
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Loading ...Monsoons can wreck havoc on old structures. A structural audit of a building can save you a lot of trouble and keep you safe, says Shilpa Sachdev .
With every passing year, your building combats a series of natural upheavals, facing the apathy of every season that goes by. Many buildings built during the last 20 to 30 years are in severe structural distress.
Leakages are a common sight during monsoons.To add to this, we hear of sporadic incidents of building collapse, which has resulted in irreparable losses, both of men and material. The collapse of old buildings in Mumbai brought both civic authorities and residents to become more serious about maintaining their premises. And that’s when the concept of ’structural audit’ became known.
In Mumbai it is likely to be made mandatory very soon. According to the model bye-law no. 77 for co-operative housing societies, it is mandatory that if the age of a building is 15 to 30 years, a structural audit must be carried out once in five years and for buildings older than 30 years it should be carried out once in three years. One may, however, go for it even earlier if one suspects the condition of the building to be bad.Perhaps monsoon/ post monsoon is the best time to commission a structural audit since the seepage is more evident at that time.
“A structural audit is nothing but a medical examination of your building,” says JJ Shah, a durability expert. “Just like one doesn’t want to take risks with one’s body, the same way, by doing structural audit one makes sure that he is living within a safe premise.It helps us understand the current situation of the building and the diagnosis can lead us further as to what kind of corrective measures can be taken to render safety to the structure. Leakage is the biggest disease and the most common too. Almost all buildings go through leakage problems in the monsoons. The moment water seeps in, the rest of the damage starts on its own. Leakage weakens your RCC frame, which is the backbone of any building. One has to make sure the waterproofing system is in place.”
The steps to a healthy premise start right from the drawing board stage itself. Your architect is your first friend,believes Shah and then the design engineer. “Today it is essential that along with concentrating on your building structure at the drawing board stage, one should appoint a durability consultant who will supervise your architect and design engineer.This will make sure the quality of construction is not compromised.And people are willing to pay if you give quality in return.”
But people need to take an initiative to conduct a structural audit by voluntarily coming ahead to do so. It is the duty of the managing committee to make sure it gets done in time. A structural audit would normally cost anything between Rs. 250 to Rs. 1000 per flat but the cost depends upon many other factors like the age of the building.
How does one go about doing a structural audit? Umesh Dhargalkar of Indian Society of Structural Engineers says,“A structural audit broadly consists of two types of surveys. The external survey covers building faces, common areas (stilts, staircase, terrace, projections etc) and ancillary structures (pump room, compound wall, water tanks etc).The internal survey covers individually owned units such as apartments,shops etc,and for this reason,the members should be informed well in advance so that maximum flats can be surveyed. However, sometimes some units are locked or inaccessible. If the number of such flats is small (say about 10%), structural audit report can still be prepared based on the observations in the flats that were surveyed. Feedback from members can also be useful. The managing committee should provide the consultant with information about the building’s repair history.”
Once the survey is done, the consultant gives a set of recommendations to the committee. But many cooperative societies have internal differences that come in the way of actual implementation. “Carrying out structural repairs is an expensive task and mostly neglected because buildings are not cash-rich enough to fund the repairs as they do not have a sinking fund. In fact the system should be made more accountable by not only getting the audit done but also ensuring that the necessary steps are taken if need be. And lastly one must not forget to regularly keep maintaining one’s society for its sustainability in the long run,” says Utkarsh Jani of Edifice Erections Pvt Ltd,another consultant.
And like they say, ‘Prevention is better than cure’, so act in time.
SOURCES:
Times Of India
Topics: Construction, The Facts, Reports |
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