It’s not very glamourous – and it does cost money, but if a structure is not maintained as designed and constructed it won’t perform as intended. Poor maintenance can actually be the cause of a building or civil engineering structure failing, or an accident occurring.
Examples
For example, I investigated a slip and fall accident on a stair landing at a retail outlet several years ago. Residual detergent from cleaning the landing was a factor in causing a man to slip and fall and injure himself. The detergent reduced the skid resistance of the floor material covering the landing from adequate to inadequate.
Another example was the classic failure of a soil-steel bridge – a very large, corrugated steel culvert, carrying a road over a stream. My forensic investigation found that the water corroded the hunches of the culvert causing it to collapse injuring a car driver. Corrosion of the hunches – a critical part of a soil-steel bridge, is a classic fact of life for these types of bridges. Better design, and regular inspection and maintenance would have prevented the failure.
To be fair, I’ve not seen reference to the need for proper maintenance on very many design and construction drawings over the years, if any.
Maintenance part of design and construction
Yet proper inspection and maintenance is part of the design and construction process. I noted this in a blog a couple of years ago on the failure of the Elliot Lake parking garage (Ref. 1)
So, how’s an owner to know? It seems, at the very least, that if you observe deterioration in your structure then you know you no longer have what was originally designed and built. And no longer what users of the structure understand it to be – as serviceable and safe as originally intended.
Coming along every now and then and ‘restoring’ a structure doesn’t count because what you’re restoring is the effects of poor or no maintenance. Regular maintenance is what counts if a structure is to reach its design life. This is the length of time a structure is designed to be serviceable. It is quite an important concept in engineering design.
Mysterious report on parking garage maintenance
I was reminded of the importance of proper maintenance when I read an item on the enquiry of the Elliot Lake parking garage failure in a recent MacLean’s magazine. (Ref. 2) There was frequent reference to maintenance in the two page item.
I also see an item in today’s Chronicle Herald, Halifax, about the maintenance needs of the 4,300 bridges in Nova Scotia – and the fact the money may not be there for all the maintenance necessary (Ref. 3). Or some of the money that is available might perhaps be better spent on other projects. The item noted that maintenance must be done on some bridges just to get them in fair or good condition. Does that mean some bridges in Nova Scotia are in poor condition?
The MacLean’s article was reporting on the mysterious appearance at the enquiry of a report from the Ontario Ministry of Housing, circa 1988, written by an expert advisory panel on the “Deterioration, repair, and maintenance of parking garages”.
The new-found report wasn’t the first to sound the alarm about “rotting parking garages”. CMHC (the Canada Mortgage and Housing Cooperation) issued three research reports in the 1980s about the deterioration in parking garages.
The answer
Regular inspection and repair – maintenance when carried out on a regular basis, was the answer running through the reports.
This was also the answer to preventing the failure of the soil-steel bridge. Simply walking through the culvert at low water, noting any corrosion, and fixing it. I did this at several intact soil-steel bridges in eastern Canada – simply walked through them, during my investigation of the failure.
The need for cleaning a soapy residue from a stair landing at a retail outlet is not very glamourous maintenance work but simple to do.
References
- Cause of the roof collapse at Elliot Lake, posted July 10, 2012 http://www.ericjorden.com/blog/2012/07/10/cause-of-the-roof-collapse-at-elliot-lake/
- Elliot Lake: Warning signs, long forgotten, MacLean’s Magazine, June 9, 2014
- Chronicle Herald, page A5, June 12, 2014