On Christmas Eve, three thousand residents were forced to leave their apartments in the 38-storey Opal Tower in Olympic Park.
Residents had reported hearing a loud ‘cracking’ noise throughout the day, which led to a mass evacuation.
A huge crack had been found in a wall, and it was feared the building would collapse.
Engineers estimated that the crack on the 10th floor caused parts of the building to shift up to 2mm.
But this building was not decades old or weathered. It was completed in August this year.
So how does a newly built tower result in an evacuation?
It could be symptomatic of a wider systematic pressure on tradesmen to quickly complete jobs, sacrificing quality over quantity.
A structural engineer who has worked for large developers in the Sydney building boom between 2015 and 2016 has explained the culture on Reddit, breaking down how the problem may have emerged.
“Quite frankly I’m not surprised. I regularly saw poor planning, poor execution, poor workmanship during my limited site inspections, and that’s only the parts I was looking at. Several of the projects I’ve worked on required remedial action during construction due to poor planning and workmanship,” he wrote in the post.
He explained that he was a main engineer for a large building company in the same area, and that the building concepts do not make him confident.
Here is how he explains what might have resulted in Opal Tower.
Firstly, he explains that new connections in the buildings are made without engineer consultation.
“Slab to column and slab to shear wall connections were regularly missed as frequent changes in architectural layouts (to squeeze more apartments in after the initial DA). New connections had to be doweled in – decisions often made by site personnel with no engineering training. Even if an engineer signs off on it there’s rarely checks – they only follow what they’ve been instructed to do in the past,” he wrote.
Top Comments
I enjoy how this structural engineer has somehow implied it’s not the engineers fault if the building is not sound.... that’s literally their job. Just because you have ‘large amounts of work’ doesn’t mean you can sign off on things without checking, imagine if surgeons didn’t close up their patients because they had ‘a large amount of work’ 😂
Sorry, but having worked on many large scale projects - i just don't agree that engineers should be signing off work without proper checks. That is pure negligence! If he has seen all these problems, he needs to alert the main project manager and he should not be signing off shoddy work. I understand the time pressure, and the aggressiveness of some builders to force you to sign off on things to speed up the process - but I have had builders yell at me until their face goes red- who cares I would never give my sign off unless I am satisfied with the work.