Why alarm bells are still ringing on apartment fire safety

FEATURED: Fire risk in multi-residential buildings was front page news again recently, with the release of findings that nearly 90 per cent of Victorian apartment buildings surveyed over a 12-month period did not meet fire safety compliance requirements.  So why are we still seeing this kind of data? And what needs to be done by whom to fix the issues?

When building surveyor Dr Stephen Scimonello undertook his PhD research through Victoria University, he examined local council records of fire safety compliance inspections and found that only 13 per cent of Victorian apartment buildings and 35.9 per cent of NSW apartment buildings qualified as compliant.

The research made headlines on the front page of The Age and was featured in the Sydney Morning Herald, where Scimonello explained what was happening.

One reason is that developers and builders increasingly opt for active fire safety systems as they can be more cost-effective to implement than passive systems, however these require more ongoing maintenance,

The Fifth Estate spoke to several fire engineers who verified that with passive systems there were several issues around appropriate installation of key fire protection elements such as dampers and fire collars, problems around appropriate inspections of firewalls, and sometimes with the design and installation of wet fire systems including pumps and sprinklers.

Renovations, retrofits and repairs can also compromise fire systems, for example, where NBN installers create penetrations in fire walls for cabling and but don’t properly seal them afterwards.

Do owners know what they need to know?

An overarching issue is also the level of information that building owners receive post-completion.

Co-author of the Building Confidence Report and construction legal expert, Bronwyn Weir, tells The Fifth Estate that there has been limited traction on building manuals.

In Europe, a large amount of work has been done, driven by sustainability and transparency regulations.

In Australia, we’re still at the policy discussion stage. The questions around digital building information, where it sits and how it is coordinated are yet to be answered by governments.

Mandating requirements for building information is “easier than it sounds” as there are some significant questions, including where it is held, what’s included, who has access to it and how it is updated.

The competitive instinct can also be an issue

When a business is “trying to commercialise something, it gets in the way of holistic solutions,” Weir says.

The result is a range of different products in the market. We see multiple platforms, and in many cases the data belongs to the contractor paying for the platform, not to the building and its owners. If the contractor is replaced, they walk away with the owners’ data.

“We probably need a single source of truth held by government that is accessible by owners and their contractors,” Weir says.

“We just have this complete lack of transparency about information, and a lot of information about buildings should be considered public information.”

This information also needs to be accessible to key stakeholders such as emergency responders, or for enforcement and compliance.

There also needs to be an effective mechanism for keeping information up to date and lodging inspection records with government so they can ensure maintenance obligations are being met.

Insurance has a stake

Weir says the insurance market is an influencer in the space, as it needs access to asset information to manage risk, but we are not anywhere near governments understanding their role in this.

That role should include necessary enforcement, or it won’t work.

“If there isn’t enforcement, some might do the right thing, but many won’t.”

Those not providing the appropriate information may have reasons ranging from the cost of obtaining the information, challenges with compliance costs, or in a small number of cases for some “nefarious” reason.

It’s not set and forget

There is also a broader issue of building maintenance with: 97 per cent of our building stock is existing. Recent research by Scimonello found that almost 90 per cent of buildings fail fire safety standards.

In some cases these buildings were not originally designed and built to appropriate fire safety standards.

Weir says that in addition to issues around compliance, maintenance and collection of information and whether the fire protection industry has insufficient competent and reliable fire safety maintenance contactors.

Furthermore, in strata residential buildings, a historical lack of regulations and oversight around sinking funds means many communities are without resources for undertaking any major upgrades or repairs of fire safety features.

A change of mindset is needed.  Weir suggests strata residents should think of the sinking fund as “superannuation for your building”.

This also balances the scales when apartments or units are sold, as occupiers coming into the community “shouldn’t have the burden of 20 years of neglect”.

“It’s about making sure the owners at any one time are not saddled with a lack of funding uplift by a previous generation of owners.”

More data is needed

Chief executive officer of Fire Protection Association of Australia (FPAA) John Collie tells The Fifth Estate that there has been a lot of commentary on issues associated with non-compliant and substandard buildings, but not sufficient data available on the problem.

“When you look one layer below, it’s a very small sample of buildings that had already been identified as buildings that were substandard. So, if you go and audit the host of buildings that have already had complaints about them, then you get a pretty high hit rate on errors that have popped up across all any number of trades.”

FPAA has been talking with all the states and territories about getting better at capturing the data. This will help all the stakeholders to look at the actual problem rather than relying on anecdotes.

“Anecdotes are helpful in that they can point you towards areas that you should be looking at more closely, but other than that, we shouldn’t be making decisions on them,” Collie says.

Directions for industry improvement

There’s also a need to ensure everyone’s looking at the same information and pulling in the same direction to achieve improvements in the industry. Key challenges need to be resolved such as regulatory gaps, tightening of underpinning legislation and improvements to training.

“It’s an iterative process like any other (industry),” Collie says.

“For us, it would be far more beneficial if we were able to look at it holistically and get a good set of data from a good cross section of buildings, rather than what has occurred in the past, which is a focus on ‘let’s find the worst handful of buildings and then find the worst elements of them’, which certainly should be addressed from a remediation perspective.

“But I’d be reluctant to advocate for making broad industry affecting decisions based on that data.”

Chain of responsibility

Another issue is a lot of the available data points at “the last person who touched them” in relation to fire safety systems, when there are multiple actors in the process leading up to that final action.

These may include the project design team, the builder’s procurement team, the project manager, the site manager, building inspectors, surveyors, suppliers, intersecting trades as well as the fire engineer, the fire systems installers and the fire safety certifier.

Some of the potential failure points that Collie says could be addressed fairly quickly include ensuring licensed tradespeople are delivering the work – both specific fire safety work and the intersecting trades work such as plastering, electrical, hydraulics, roofing and HVAC.

There should also be accredited professionals involved at key points in the construction process or the ongoing life of the building who are responsible for the “last touch” matters.

“You start to get the job done well if you have licensed people delivering to work (designed) by an accredited designer. But then that’s not the whole story, because you need a check throughout the process, and then at the end to say, somebody’s certifying that, and a fire system certifier is the type of role that we would advocate for.”

Multiple inspections are best

Collie says just putting the fire system certifier at the end of the chain isn’t the best solution, as the nature of fire systems means there need to be checks “along the way”.

“Fire systems are very complex. They can be plumbed systems. They can be electrical systems. They can be integrated into the building management system, and they can be passive systems, so they can be part of the structure and the internal structure of the building itself, through firewalls and the like,” he explains.

Because a lot of these systems get built in or covered over, they are not visible at final inspection, which means any certifier would be taking compliance on faith and accumulated paperwork. Being able to verify that the system is compliant based on having completed inspections at relevant points in addition to the trades being licensed and the other participants well-credentialled, is best practice.

Cost can be a problem.

“If I’m a builder, I’m more likely to want to pay for one cheque at the end, rather than multiple cheques through critical points of the construction phase.”

Operational phase risks and responsibilities

The ongoing operational life also has risks, because the nature of many fire systems is that the only time occupants find out a system isn’t functioning is when a fire occurs, and it doesn’t perform as it should.

“There needs to be a mandated preventative maintenance regime and a continuous maintenance regime,” Collie says.

The Australian Standard AS1851 sets out the specifications for this and is currently being updated.

“AS1851 describes in great detail what a well-maintained fire system through the life of the building will look like. But it requires regulators to make that mandatory and police it,” Collie says.

Not all the states have chosen to adopt AS1851, and NSW is one of the laggards in this respect.

Another ongoing maintenance aspect building owners and building managers need to be aware of is the risk associated with new works. For example, any trade creating a penetration in the building may compromise an element of the fire protection systems.

“The challenge is that you get non fire protection trades intersecting with fire protection systems,” Collie says.

While they are qualified in their own trade, they may not have training in identifying elements of a fire protection system and be unaware if their work has made it ineffective.

“Sometimes it’s a fire damper, for instance, may not be obvious to somebody that’s just running conduit,” Collie says.

Working with the training providers to ensure there is adequate education for trades is part of the solution. Beyond that, building owners and building managers may also need to undertake some degree of self-education in understanding the risks and how to mitigate them.

Who needs to take ultimate responsibility

“I think there needs to be some ownership put back on those that are ultimately responsible for the compliance of their buildings,” Collie says. “And that’s the building owner, and the facility manager who’s acting as the agent of the building owner and the strata manager.

“They need to take their legal obligations really seriously, and that would mean educating themselves on what is expected of them and also how to know if they’re getting the service from their provider that they need.

“They need to be well informed to know what a good one actually looks like.”

The strata manager perspective

One of the major issues in strata is that the owners corporation committee is made up of volunteers who may not have sufficient time and expertise to oversee building compliance and maintenance requirements, according to Gregor Evans, managing director of The Knight.

His company specialises in owners’ corporation management, and he explains that there is often confusion around who is responsible for what.

An owners corporation manager, often referred to as a strata manager, is generally responsible for providing insurance, financial, administration, and guidance in relation to Owners Corporation legislation requirements, not advice relating to property compliance and maintenance.

A large or complex strata property may also have a building manager. However, that role may mainly provide concierge-type services, rather than genuine facilities management.

The work of managing building compliance and maintenance and oversight of matters including efficiency of utilities, waste services and performance of tradespeople would generally sit with a facilities manager, if the building or community has one.

However, in most new strata communities the developer will appoint a strata manager but avoid the cost of also appointing a facilities manager or building manager with responsibilities including managing building compliance and maintenance.

Owners and owners’ committees generally push back on costs too, Evans says, and there’s a conflict between keeping strata levies and fees low, and being able to pay for appropriate building management or facilities management.

In the absence of either of these professionals, an owners’ corporation needs to have oversight of all maintenance including the fire safety systems.

Information may be highly complex

Evans says the information received from the developer and builder may including CAD files, PDFs of floorplans and renders, warranty information and other material either on a USB or via a file sharing platform.

This information may be complex to navigate, and interpret, especially for a group of volunteers with no engineering, construction or trades experience.

“A lot of the time an owners’ corporation does not have a clear idea of what needs to be done,” Evans says.

He says one of the suggestions he makes to owners’ corporations is they get a facilities manager to come in and review all the documentation and provide them with a list of what needs to be done to ensure the building is compliant and well maintained.

This kind of basic schedule would be helpful, and a process such as this could also be enshrined in a building manual, he says.