Observations on House Safety Evaluations

By G.J. Beattie.

March 13, 2011. BRANZ Engineers.

A brief report of the collective observations of Graeme Beattie, Roger Shelton and Stuart Thurston. 75,000 houses have been inspected in 10 days. Up to 235 teams of building control officers (BCOs) and welfare people made these 75,000 visits.  Graeme Beattie coordinated a team of 13 engineers supporting this process.  The engineers were required to visit all red-placarded houses to confirm the call from the BCO or otherwise down rate the placard if there were all or parts of the house that could still be used safely.  Their primary aim was to keep people in houses as long as they were safe.  The engineers covered somewhere around 2500 to 3000 houses with about 1300 ending up with a Red placard.  The observations in this report are preliminary and are from the collective views of three BRANZ engineers in the field.