Another disaster.
Hopefully Iâll not jinx owners of new high rise apartments in the other states. Is there a particular issue with NSW construction, setting a new not so good standard? Or are the other states of Australia not looking hard enough.
The half good news is the developer is still responsible for the building. The not so good that those who have bought cannot move in, although it appears to be the safer option.
The NSW regulator recently completed a more representative survey of more than 500 recently constructed buildings to better assess the level of serious defects. The types of defects reported follow a similar pattern to the Deakin/Griffith University pilot study.
The NSW Govt Survey raised concerns with 1 in 3 buildings. The greatest concern was the lack of reporting by the Owners/Body Corporates of the serious defects to the regulator.
A survey of more than 500 buildings in NSW built in the past six years found that 36 per cent had serious defects. Of those with defects, just 17 per cent of the buildings had already been reported to the regulator.
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This should be interesting.
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Just one of 180 opportunities for owners to be angry in NSW based on the NSW regulators recent survey.
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Another day, another disaster.
I donât think Ray Hadley has anything to worry about.
Another day. Another disaster.
Engineers cover a very broad field of expertise and specialties. Regulation of Professional practice has been very limited. Self regulation has been open to individual interpretation. Commercial expediency can often conflict with good Engineering outcomes.
The Conversation has gone on to highlight:
One key question is whether erosion of professional ethics has played a part in this state of affairs. The answer is a likely âyesâ.
Engineers face ethical dilemmas such as:
- âShould I accept a narrow or inadequately framed design commission within a design and build delivery model when there is no certainty my design will be appropriately integrated with other parts of the project?â
- âHow can I accept a commission when my client provides no budget for my oversight of the construction to ensure the technical integrity of my design is maintained when built?â
- âHow do I play in a commercially competitive landscape with pressures to produce "leanerâ designs to save cost without compromising safety and long-term performance of my design?â
- "Do I hide behind the contractual clauses (or minimum requirements of codes of practice) when I know the overall process is flawed and does not deliver quality and/or value for money for the end user?â
Or worse: âDo I resort to phoenixing to avoid any accountability?â
Although reflective of questions arising in the USA is Australia looking in the same mirror?
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Wow. What a prime example of a non sequitur logical falacy that article falls into.
It was an ethical failure of the structural engineers that designed the building that stood for 40 years in a hostile environment that is responsible?
Utter rubbish. I am starting to think that The Conversation has completely lost the plot.
In reality ethics shouldnât need to be studied. A professional should be objectively undertaking their work to their best ability without fear or favour.
Teaching ethics is like teaching the population about how to be good law abiding citizens hoping there is no more criminal activity. 
That is your interpretation, the authors did not say that. They lead with an example of a structure failure, mentioned others and then went into the question of ethics in ensuring that structures are up to standard. At no time did they say A caused B in the case of the Miami surfside building.
I agree that the juxtaposition of the two without explanation is unfortunate as others will come to the same conclusion that you did.
From the comments section of the article by one author:
(My bolding)
Thank you for this very insightful comment David. I donât think we are very far apart actually. I communicated with some of my co-authors just now. We want to stress that we arenât drawing a direct line between unethical behaviour and engineering failure necessarily, but we are noting that instances like this force us to reflect on our role in the design process and regulatory processes (all the way through to monitoring, maintenance after the design has been implemented). Effectively, virtually everything about our profession is getting more complex and nuanced over time. Your point about the distinction between theoretical and practical is quite right as well. But, I would even be inclined to pose that as an ethical obligation to ensure that our technical knowledge is appropriately informed by the practical field considerations of our work.
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The title of the article is very clear. The authors are proposing that ethics are lacking and that this is a factor in cited building failures.
Maybe some editor should have suggested they publish their article, with that title, on a populist click bait site.
Yes it is. They are guilty of imprecise journalism by allowing an interpretation that they did not intend (which they subsequently explain) rather than of scholastic failure of jumping to conclusions before the evidence is in.
That is rather extreme. The section where they go on to explain the real life situations where an engineer can go wrong when caught in an ethical bind was quite good and brought up ideas, as a non-engineer, that I had not thought of.
I also think the point that all professionals need training in ethics should be raised. As a system developer I was faced with pressure to cut corners that I had to navigate and that would have been easier if I had some framework for the situation.
There is no reason rank the whole article as click-bait because of one slip-up.
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Shoddy journalism. I have just read through all the comments on this article and by and large the authors have been heavily criticized for either deliberately or inadvertantly linking ethics to engineering failures.
The article should be withdrawn, and resubmitted in a proper manner. And a competent editor assigned to review it.
Thatâs not a defect. That is building works still in progress. What a dopey article.
Nobody said it was a defect and the title of the topic is âBuilding Oversight Failuresâ.
The inspection report stated âIncomplete Fire Stair: Drops to certain death or disabilityâ.
This in a development that was âcompletedâ in 2019 and people were living in it.
"A Piety Group spokeswoman said the company was committed to fixing all building-related defects.
She said the âvoidâ in the stairwell was âsecuredâ when it was first raised and that it was addressed again after the June report warned it still posed a risk.
âThere is a void at the bottom of the Building D stairwell which will serve a future stage and has been secured,â she said.
âWhen the building manager recently notified us of an issue with the current security of the void, it was secured within 24 hours.â â
So as late in June this year, it was still not secure, let alone servicing the designed purpose for fire stairs.
The residents better hope there are no fires anytime soon.
What do you mean nobody said it was a defect?
The article headline contains âunbelievable defectâ.
The picture is clearly work in progress to build a run of steel stairs in the fire escape area.
Ethical behaviour and desirable business outcomes should never conflict. Lived experiences suggest for many itâs not how it is.
The discussion in the comments following the article from The Conversation are varied. After only a few days they vary greatly from support to disagreement.
Lived experience is some of the time those in control of the money/decision making will apply persuasion or opinion shop until the answer meets a higher need. In such situations the simple ethics of knowing right from wrong, competency from incompetence can fail to deliver the right outcome.
The topic is obviously broader than Engineering and construction. Staying to the topic, the lead authors are senior staff from Engineering at The University of New South Wales. Have they missed the mark? (No pun intended.)
The objective has been to highlight the importance of ethics in good Engineering. The examples are failures of engineered structures. If only to demonstrate the potential for harm. The actual causes are far more complex, as others suggest.
Is ethical behaviour inclusive of understanding the consequences of making poor decisions?
Knowing how to better evaluate difficult decisions, to communicate effectively what the right decision is, and to justify that to a more Senior Manager, are skills that should be included with all professional development. Itâs worth considering many Engineering decisions are subject to review and agreement by those with no Engineering skills or training.
The Conversation topic heading does include âEngineersâ and the âStudy of Ethicsâ.
The UNSW is presenting clear values, in the proposed curriculum objectives.
The curriculum should include:
- skills/expertise â the underlying intellectual basis for discerning what is ethical and what is not, which is much more than codes of conduct or a prescriptive, formulaic approach
- practice â practical know-how in terms of ethical solutions that engineers can apply
- mindset â having an individual and group culture of acting ethically. The engineersâ problem-solving mindset must be supplemented by constant reflection on the decisions made and their ethical consequences.
Perhaps Iâve different coloured lenses, having lived some of the experiences raised in the article professionally.
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No, the building is ostensibly complete not a building site in progress therefore works uncompleted are a defect.
Re the photo and its context, the article implies that is supposed to be âthe solutionâ and the âclearly work in progressâ has been in progress for ~2 years. As @Fred123 reiterated the building has been and is occupied.
How a building could get a certificate for occupancy without a safe and properly built fire escape is a real question, followed by why it seems to have been so difficult to get the builder/developer to do the right thing.
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