The Government of Barbados has several roles. One critical role is to regulate industries that are out of control. The residential construction industry is out of control. We have been fortunate as a country to have had a Government with the vision to establish national building standards. The Barbados National Building Code was published 15 years ago, just before the current unprecedented building boom. The Code includes much of the technical advice that the following professionals normally provide their clients:
Yet, for some inexplicable reason, the Government has not required that builders follow the national building standards. In my opinion, requiring builders to follow the minimum building standards does not require the proclamation of any new laws. Last weekend, I visited some residential building construction sites hoping that I would see some improvement in the residential construction building practices. There was little good construction available for me to photograph, but the ubiquitous sub-standard construction completely filled my 1 Gigabyte memory card.
Source: Weighed In The Balance
Last week we highlighted an article which Structural Engineer Grenville Phillips III published on his blog. We found his input to be very educational and we take the opportunity to encourage others to come forward and share information with the public. We are in a building boom which has been unravelling for a long period of time. We have been importing labour in the construction industry to respond to the demand. Access to ready mortgage financing has made it possible for many Barbadians to build houses in numbers. It is important that if Barbadians are not to fritter away their investments on such a significant undertaking our authorities need to ensure that our Building Code is enforced.
Read on to gain some insights from someone who is qualified to speak.
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We want to thank Grenville for educating the BU family on what is a burning issue.
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First off i agree that there are real issues in the construction sector in Barbados, but if u knew anything tha was goin on u would realise that that glorified book they call a code is completely rediclious, anything tha applied fifteen years ago is completely outdated as construction is a diverse and expanding industry.
The reason the construction is so shabby is probably for two reasons
1) because the building code is completely outdated and allows for, or doesn’t cover that sort of work
2)because the builder was completely uneducated and shouldn’t be building in the first place, up to date building code or not