Fatal fall brings call for railing heights to be raised
Once again there is a call to raise the height of balcony railings on high-rise buildings following a spate of fatal falls in recent months – the latest this weekend when a 21-year-old man plunged to his death from a Southbank apartment building in Melbourne.
The man plunged from the glass balcony on the 26th floor to the sixth-floor patio of the 36-storey apartment building, built by Central Equity.
Building Code of Australia’s existing rules state balcony railings must be one metre high, raised from 90cm in 2002.
Builders Collective of Australia’s national president Phil Dwyer says height limits should be extended to 120cm. “A metre is not high enough. “You would have no trouble sitting on something a metre high”
In Victoria, balcony railing height limits imposed in 2002 were not retrospective and many older apartments balcony railings at only 90cm.
And, in an audit of Victoria’s building permit system by the Victorian Building Authority revealed a pattern of poor compliance in high-rise developments to regulations. In particular, fire safety was of major concern. According to The Sunday Age, documents for hundreds of building permits checked by the VBA were substandard, with many lacking key fire safety details.
Paperwork for 64 per cent of the commercial building permits audited lacked enough detail and drawings to tell if they met fire-resistance standards, leading the VBA to conclude the “buildings may be a risk to occupants in a fire situation”.
The authority quizzed surveyors about the 450 substandard permits and found 95 per cent “posed no risk to health and safety,” the authority’s technical and regulation director Jarrod Edwards said. About 1 per cent with serious breaches needed enforcement action, he said.
Mr Dwyer said the very high non-compliance rates were an “indication of an accident waiting to happen”.
“One permit might represent a 70-level tower. If something went wrong, it could be catastrophic,” he said.
