Do companies that provide services to buildings, such as telecom companies, consider the safety of the building and its life-saving systems?
In the photo below, communication cables and fittings are installed inside a floor-level smoke-extraction shaft:
This shaft is meant to vent smoke out of a multi-story residential building, floor by floor, during a fire. It runs the full height of the building and opens onto the lobby on every floor. Buildings with a lobby split into two wings have two such shafts, one per wing.
These shafts are also called extraction shafts, because they are meant to draw the smoke out during a fire. In high-rise residential buildings, a powerful fan on the roof switches on automatically during a fire and creates suction through every floor lobby.
The shaft has to stay clear of obstructions, or the smoke will not clear quickly enough or at the required rate. It should go without saying that in a fire, the first system to fail in the building would be the communication system itself, damaged by the heat.
Every floor has a dedicated service cabinet for communication equipment, but various constraints led installers to put the equipment in the smoke-extraction shaft instead. Fixing the defect means separating the smoke-extraction space from the communication space on every floor, in both wings. In a 20-story building, that comes to about ₪50,000.
Who is responsible for the failure, and for the repair? The problem starts with planning and execution that failed to keep the communication area properly separated from the space meant for smoke extraction. Is the cable installer responsible too? That is less clear, since communication technicians are not necessarily aware that they are working inside a smoke-extraction shaft tied to the communication cabinet.
Residents are rarely aware of this, and it is worth noting that many engineers can also miss a defect of this kind. It takes a team of qualified inspecting engineers checking the common areas, including the life-saving electromechanical systems, to catch it.
If we had not flagged this, the situation might have stayed this way indefinitely. In these inspections we find life-endangering failures in many buildings, and we flag them in an engineering expert opinion that obligates the contractor to act.
The engineers of Arad Bedek Bayit, led by building engineer Ron Arad, whom courts appoint as their own expert on construction defects. The company has been inspecting apartments and buildings since 2001. Engineer Ron Arad · More about the company