Cutting costs with human lives

I was watching the movie The Towering Inferno the other day. It exposed me a side of construction and architecture that I was never really aware of up until then – how cost cutting, shoddy workmanship and ‘creative get-around’ methods are employed by builders when building properties, which are in essence, death traps.

Then I read about the fire at Bourke St. (Myers), which is the 2nd time in 2 months. It just makes me think that in their greed and quest for profits, all these developers putting people’s lives at risk just makes me sick. I feel almost sure that they employ vastly different standards of qualifying in building their own homes. My family being in the construction business as well, I am privy to some info on the safety of some of our homes today as well.

It is a common occurrence to replace high grade materials with lousier materials, or even different specs that were originally drawn up by architects. Architects also are under pressure to reduce costs while maintaining certain expensive features, such as attractive looks, hence safer but more expensive materials will surely be sacrificed. An example is our tarmac: although we are supposed to use high grade, high concentration tar with a certain pebble density, we are using something much cheaper. That’s why a section of road on our North South highway en route back from Penang to KL is especially slippery during heavy rains. It just makes you wonder 100 years from now, what will be the condition of some of our landmark properties.