Safe room (mamad) inspection

What a safe room inspection covers

An inspection of a safe room (mamad) covers safety defects that can affect how well the room is sealed or how safe it is, functional defects such as height differences in the flooring, and finally aesthetic defects.

Safety defects

Every safe room is supposed to be approved by the Civil Defense (HAGA), yet safety defects are still found from time to time.

A few examples:

1. The door frame has to be cast in one pour with the concrete walls. When the frame is not properly braced, the pour sometimes shifts or distorts it. It is then very hard to install the door level, and the door becomes very difficult to close. Try a simple test: ask the lady of the house to close the door and see whether she can. Any adult, man or woman, should of course be able to close it. In severe cases light or air even gets through between the door and the frame, which means the room is not gas-tight in an emergency.
2. The gas-tight blast window has two "windows" in its sill. These are meant to be opened so that cement grout can be injected into the steel sill, closing it up completely. This is often forgotten.
3. Every safe room is supposed to have an automatic blower with an electrical outlet. Make sure all the equipment is there and that the resident knows how to operate the system.

Functional defects

A safe room can have various construction defects, functional defects among them. A few examples:

1. Height differences between tiles. Israeli Standard (SI) 1555 for flooring allows a height difference of up to 1.5 mm. Beyond that, the tile has to be taken up and laid again.
2. The steel blast window is a heavy window that runs on small wheels. Make sure it moves freely and that it can be locked with the hooks provided for that purpose.
   The window must also be free of rust and properly painted.
3. Deviations in the walls of the safe room (horizontal or vertical) may exceed what Israeli Standard 789 permits, and in extreme cases reduce the area of the safe room.

Problems with the safe room window

In a building inspection, an important group of functional defects concerns the safe room window.
In a safe room, the window sometimes cannot open the full 180 degrees it is supposed to (for example, when a wall stands perpendicular to it and the window hits the wall).

The window then opens only partly, so part of it is always closed.
Opening the window fully is especially important in a safe room because of radon gas, which is known to be present there in high concentrations because of the large amount of concrete surrounding the room's walls.

Besides the health hazard there is, of course, functional damage: the area under and near the window cannot be used in full. For example, it is a problem to put a bed under a window that stands open at an angle and endangers whoever uses the bed.

This reduces the area of the room. In these cases too, you can demand compensation from the contractor for loss of value.

Another problem with the safe room window has to do with the blast window of thick, heavy steel that is part of the window assembly. Blast windows are mounted on small wheels that move them along a track. These wheels often wear out, or jam on dirt that collected there during construction (sometimes actual pieces of stone). You cannot see it, but the window is in fact stuck and unusable from its very first day.

What should you do? Check that the blast window opens and closes. If there is a problem, the contractor has to clean the tracks thoroughly and lubricate them.

The window itself should have protective rubber corners. They are not expensive, but the contractor is required to fit them for your protection.

Aesthetic defects

As in any part of the apartment, aesthetic defects can be many and varied.

They range from rough plaster and paint smears to air openings in the safe room whose finish is not round and symmetrical, poor finishing around the door and the window, and many more.

The contractor will sometimes argue that the defect is one the standard permits. The resident should know to answer that not only does the standard deal with aesthetic defects too, but there are plenty of court rulings on the subject, including from the District Court, which have held that an apartment has to be aesthetic.