How estate surveyors’ can prevent building collapse

Nigeria, in the past 10 years, has recorded quite an embarrass­ing number of build­ing collapse, especial­ly in the big cities, raising concerns on the effectiveness of the role played by the built environment professionals and the regulatory agencies whose duty it is to ensure use of quality building materials.

High incidence of building col­lapse as witnessed in Nigeria with Lagos, the country’s commercial nerve centre, accounting for over 50 percent of the incidence, is a major socio-economic problem as each incident leaves in its trail loss of lives and property, family dislocation and social dysfunction.

Worried by this development, the Building Collapse Prevention Guild (Ikeja Cell) in Lagos, recently organised a symposium with the theme, ‘Building Maintenance (Pre & Post Construction): The Role of the Estate Surveyor & Valuer’, seek­ing to identify the problems and proffer solutions.

Olayinka Omotosho, the guest speaker at the symposium, high­lighted some of the causes of build­ing collapse and how the estate surveyor and valuer, working in collaboration with other build­ing professionals, particularly the architect and the engineer , can prevent building collapse right from the design stage of building and construction.

Omotosho who is himself an estate surveyor and valuer andthe chairman, Royal Institute of Char­tered Surveyors (RICS), Nigerian Group, listed some of the causes of building collapse as influx of substandard building materials into the market leading to defects in buildings, non-implementation of the National Building Code, employment of cheap and un­qualified labour, use of quark s or unqualified building contractors, lack of adequate supervision by the designer(architect) and engi­neer, etc.

The need to prevent the collapse incidence, he said, calls for building maintenance and this is where the role of the building professionals becomes critical beginning from design to completion (pre to post- construction) stage.

“The successful completion of any building depends on a lot of key factors, few of which are as important as the relationship of all professionals involved in the process. In most cases, the Estate Surveyor acts as a consultant to the client (property owner) mean­ing he/she act as an intermediary between other professionals on behalf of the client until the final two stages in construction which is the disposition and maintenance stage”, he said.

Continuing, he said, “since the activities in terminal stages of a building project is a role the

estate surveyor occupied, and his effectiveness in this role would be dependent on the quality of work done in the preceding stages. It becomes important that he is well grounded in those stages to enforce a quality that will be required in at­taining the client end goal.”

He explained that the pre-construction stage is a phase in the life of a building that involves establishing a performance model for the building, as an essential pre-requisite for the proper and effec­tive management of that building, including its maintenance, adding that it is also the model that bench­marks the performance upon which the building can be measured just as it acts as a working standard in­dicating the attitude to be adopted throughout the construction stage.

“An Architect without the guid­ance and direction of a mainte­nance expert trades functionality for aesthetics”, he noted, pointing out that buildings that are designed without the maintenance implica­tion in mind suffer functional obso­lescence from the start and the cost implication of rectifying this defect is usually so high that ignoring the defect only leads to an accumulated future maintenance cost.

To avoid this, he said, an estate surveyor works hand in hand with the architect by communicating the future maintenance consequence of building design to the architect as this helps the architect to integrate maintenance implication into his design.

“The estate surveyor and Valuer should ensure that only approved materials are used as component input in the construction”, he ad­vised, stressing that a compromise in the standard affects the fabrics and component maintenance requirement in future.

“The estate surveyor can , through experience, enforce some specifications during construction in order to avoid future mainte­nance issue. For example, the depth and width of a roof gutter, when flat roof type is used can be specified by the maintenance expert (estate surveyor). Basic knowledge of ex­perienced maintenance issue in the field can also be very useful during construction phase”.