Comparative study between dutch and spanish structural safety performances

Abstract

Dutch building industry has faced several major structural incidents for the past years. Some of them not only involved material damage and remarkable economical losses but also human casualties. Therefore a great concern has grown among the parties belonging to the Dutch building industry and the assumption is that a piece of the construction mechanism is inherently working in a defective way. Initiatives for locating the source of the mentioned problem and then trying to fix it have been launched in great numbers. Some examples are the regular – anonymous and voluntary – online registration of construction incidents, their later analysis and the publication of recommendations in order to avoid repetition of mistakes and learn from them (this is an initiative carried out by Platform Constructieve Veiligheid1 in combination with TNO2 and other entities); or the compilations of guidelines specially addressed to clients and many articles which discuss the situation from different perspectives. This proves that Dutch people are not ones who sit and simply expect things to improve spontaneously or worsen. Yet the efforts spent on the cause have not resulted in a concluding answer at this point. The boundaries of the problem are still too broad and consequently, it is also handled with meandrous measures. This investigation intends to make a contribution in this search from a different point of view. The principle is simple: to know what is missing or working abnormally within Dutch building industry by comparing it with an equivalent system. Hence a comparison with the Spanish building industry is made in terms of structural safety and control procedures. In first place, the functioning of both industries is described; that is, phases in the development of a structural project and involved parties along with a brief mention on the most notable structural incidents occurred in both countries during the same period of time, including an approach to the their causes. It is documented in many sources (e.g. [1], [2] ) that the design stage of a structural project is a common origin for many of the mistakes which eventually turn into structural failures. For this reason, secondly, it is performed and hereby presented a study in depth of engineering companies which are entities mainly in charge of the project design. These companies are sounded out by means of a digital survey. The initial assumption is that indeed there is a leak in terms of structural safety within Dutch building industry, somewhere in the development process of a structural project. Surprisingly, results from the survey depict an industry – the Dutch one – which compared to the Spanish industry, should be considered more reliable. In general, Dutch engineering companies posses the resources of time and money to perform proper control tasks and ensure a high quality product. Of course, shortages and improvable procedures have also been found, but they are not significant enough to be pointed as the unequivocal cause of the problem. Considering the results, it is finally recommended to keep the perspective described in this report but to broaden it so that it includes the scrutiny of other parties, besides the thorough reexamination of the engineering companies. 1 Platform Structural Safety 2 Independent research organization