Jamaica's new building code imminent
Published:Friday | February 7, 2014 | 12:00 AM
AN ESTIMATED 70 per cent of Jamaica's buildings are designed without professional inputs, making the legalisation of the new building code essential, according to stakeholders, in disaster resilience.
"The most essential thing when it comes to earthquake preparedness is ensuring that there is structural integrity. You have to ensure that your buildings are sound and built to code and engineering specifications and that you look also at seismic engineering," said Richard Thompson, acting director general of the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management.
But before the new building code - on which significant work has been done to replace the current 106-year-old legal code - can become law, the Building Act must be passed.
Dwight Wilson, senior director of technical services and major projects in the Ministry of Local Government and Community Development, said the Government is on track to have the new legislation passed by the end of next month.
"The Government of Jamaica, through the Ministry of Local Government and Community Development, has taken the matter of the building code very seriously," he said, speaking at the Seismic Risk and Safety Forum in Kingston last month.
"After several years of trying to get the act passed, we feel that we are now at the stage where we are on the final lap and are gearing and pressing full speed ahead to have the act passed by the end of this financial year," Wilson added.
There are, however, some remaining hurdles to cross before the bill can become law, including the parliamentary debate process and concerns raised by a working group that has looked at drafts of the proposed act.
several concerns
The concerns, according to engineer Noel DaCosta, who has worked on the new building code - modelled off the International Building Code of the International Codes Council of the United States - include:
Ambiguity surrounding the roles of building practitioners (implementers) and building professionals (designers);
That local authorities should be able to contract certified professionals as code officials;
Issues of monitoring building use and the mandatory inspection of certain buildings;
The need to adequately address fines for breaching 'Stop Notices'; and
Confusion among various certificates of compliance.
"Our concerns have been communicated to the chief parliamentary counsel who will hopefully make the appropriate amendments and pass the bill on to the legislative committee of Cabinet, who will then take the bill to Parliament where it may be examined by a joint select committee," said DaCosta, a past president of the Jamaica Institution of Engineers, speaking, too, at January's seismic forum in the capital.
Still, despite the progress, after years of waiting, some stakeholders are sceptical over whether the new code - which currently resides in the Bureau of Standards as a set of voluntary standards - will finally become law.
"I have a newspaper clipping from April 1983 ... . It is a statement from Edward Seaga saying we would have a building code by the end of that year. Thirty-one years later, we have consensus from both political parties that we need this thing," said Franklin McDonald, former coordinator of the Institute of Sustainable Development and now Visiting Scholar at Canada's York University.
"[Now] I hear some very concrete plans being made and that, by March 31 this year, it will all be done. But I have heard that before," he added.
ODPEM's boss is more optimistic.
specifications first
"It has been long in coming, but I think what happened is that they started working on the engineering specifications before working on the legislation. There is a commitment to ensure that the bill is passed by the end of this financial year," he told The Gleaner.
And, Thompson added, there is no question of the need.
"When people follow the requisite building process, we, as state officials, can now have a greater understanding, and get better statistics to say this is the state of our structural readiness for earthquakes. Since it is in the reverse, you can only assess on the basis of the roughly 40 per cent formality and the fact that we have good artisans so that we won't end up like Haiti," he said.