Building problems 'ignored', says engineer

By SIMON COLLINS

The Auckland engineer who blew the whistle on New Zealand's dangerous high-rise construction practices last year has attacked the Government for ignoring the problem.

John Scarry, now a contract design engineer with Ponsonby engineers Lewis and Williamson, said yesterday that the new Building Act passed this month had dealt with leaky houses but "does absolutely nothing to address the serious problems in structural engineering".

The president of the Structural Engineering Society, Dr Barry Davidson, said he was "exasperated" too. "This [act] has been written by people who don't even know what an earthquake is," he said.

"It's a time bomb waiting to go off. When we get an earthquake in Turkey or somewhere we smugly think that's a Third World country and it won't happen here, but I wonder how smug they are when it happens in Wellington?

"If you take out 5 per cent or more of the buildings in Wellington over a 20-second period, if you factored that into the cost of it you might come out with something different."

Mr Scarry wrote a 72-page "open letter" to Engineers NZ last year with voluminous appendices detailing examples of poor construction standards in high-rise buildings.

He was given 15 minutes to present a 106-page submission to the parliamentary committee on the Building Bill last October, but said yesterday that almost all his proposals had been ignored.

Last month he wrote again to all 120 MPs warning that the construction industry faced "collapse" in 10 to 20 years time unless the bill was amended to require registration of companies as well as individual builders, and to levy all new buildings to fund subsidies to train young people for the building trade.

"There are virtually no resources available to carry out the necessary research, testing and training that are absolutely vital to the survival of the industry. The bill does nothing to address this," he told MPs.

He said yesterday that Parliament's failure to deal with the danger was "the greatest political scandal of the last 10 years".

National and Act voted against the bill on the basis that the new registration requirements would add to the cost of building. But Mr Scarry said the costs of not extending the regulations to companies, and not requiring actual on-site checks of building work, would be even higher when the buildings collapsed in an earthquake.

Dr Davidson confirmed that most developers were not willing to pay for structural engineers to check that their buildings were actually built as designed.


Dr Davidson said the parliamentary committee gave him 10 minutes to present his society's submission and ignored most of its proposals.

"We put a lot of hours into it. I had a team of four or five guys working on it. It's a bit tough when you put in many, many hours and get 10 minutes," he said.

The Associate Minister of Commerce in charge of the bill, John Tamihere, told Mr Scarry in a reply to his latest letter that some of his warnings would be addressed in changes to the Companies Act next year to deal with "phoenix" construction companies, which are set up for individual construction projects and then deregistered.

Mr Tamihere said yesterday that Mr Scarry had oversimplified the act's licensing regime.

"The legislation does not set out the specifics. We are currently consulting on how the licensing regime should work, which will also be included in regulations," he said.