{"id":107154,"date":"2020-09-30T16:47:14","date_gmt":"2020-09-30T23:47:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=107154"},"modified":"2020-09-30T16:47:14","modified_gmt":"2020-09-30T23:47:14","slug":"the-urgent-need-for-a-building-code-for-sri-lanka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2020\/09\/30\/the-urgent-need-for-a-building-code-for-sri-lanka\/","title":{"rendered":"The urgent need for a Building Code for Sri Lanka"},"content":{"rendered":"

A. Hettiarachchi<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

The\nrecent unfortunate incident where three lives were lost due to a building\ncollapse in Kandy prompted me to write this article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About\nsix months ago there was a \u2018Question Time Meeting \u2018 of a professional\nassociation allied to building construction industry held in Wijerama Mawatha\nin Colombo 7. The topic of that particular meeting was the construction of\nShangrila Hotel Building. It was presented very well by one of the engineers\nresponsible for the management aspect of the project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At\nthe end of the presentation, I put the question as to which code of practice\nthe building was designed. There was no doubt as to whether the project has\nbeen designed well and what I wanted to know was which code has been used for\nthe project. The presenter informed that a Hong Kong based consultancy had done\nthe structural design, and with respect to the code he said it has been\ndesigned according to BS 8110 (British Standard No. 8110). I then asked why we\nstick to an old code even Britain has superseded, here in Sri lanka, there was\nno answer. It is not only the Structural Design Code (such as the Eurocode or\nthe British code mentioned above) that is important for such a project but  other aspects such as Drainage, Sewerage, Roads,\nthe aspects with regard to soil investigations etc are all included in a\ndocument called \u2018Building Code\u2019 and made into law by every responsible\ngovernment in the world.  So I asked the\nquestion whether there is such a document existing in Sri Lanka. After a lapse\nof few minutes one lady got up and said that such a document is being prepared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For\nsuch a document to be prepared  there is\na need to put in the details of other codes as well and it is not possible to\nhave it as there are no codes for any of the aspects mentioned above existing\nin our country as at now, as far as I know. Those foreign consultants that get\nthe assignments for various projects do the design using whatever the criteria\nthey can get hold of and get the building approval probably by various means\njust like in the case of the collapsed building in Kandy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So,\nmy appeal to the political authority is to get the mess with respect to\nauthority approval of buildings sorted out and stream lined by having various\ncodes prepared as soon as possible and fall in line with other countries like\nSingapore, Hong Kong etc in the region without further delay. I have observed\nfrom some CCTV footage that some of the road accidents that happen in our\ncountry are due to not adhering to the design principals in road widening etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A. Hettiarachchi The recent unfortunate incident where three lives were lost due to a building collapse in Kandy prompted me to write this article. About six months ago there was a \u2018Question Time Meeting \u2018 of a professional association allied to building construction industry held in Wijerama Mawatha in Colombo 7. The topic of that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[158],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}