Discussion

Main Board| Accommodation Wanted| Accommodation Offered
Start a new discussion on this board

Let your next career move come to you.

RAA concrete in school buildings and collapse risk

anyone know anything about this? came on my radar a few months ago via private eye - my kid’s school buildings are the right period…. anyone else worrying about it? struggling to get any information from the school or the local authority…. what to do? 

https://www.building.co.uk/news/unions-demand-action-from-the-governmen…

and on the latter note, while most asbestos sealed within walls etc will never trouble human health, rates of mesothelioma among retired teachers are, I believe, statistically significantly higher than for other white collar roles to a degree that suggests that across the whole population there is asbestos harm from schools

not so much for those who spend a few years being educated in them as for those who work in hem for decades

first I’ve heard about the collapse thing. Our kids’ school is basically an interwar house

Yes, and it’s a fvcking nightmare because it’s really hard to inspect. You basically have to take the whole building to bits to check if it’s about to fall over.

Concrete buildings built 30-50 years ago are generally a complete sh!tshow because they aren’t built to be inspected or repaired.

“Oh you’ve got a leak? That’s unlucky; we built the pipes into the structural concrete because we thought that was pretty whizzy. Soz.”

ah yes the British love of burying everything in solid wall (even making it illegal not to do so, kind of, in the case of electric wiring) rather than running it through accessible conduits

one of the most mental manifestations of our financialist short-termism 

doubly invidious with concrete because it is very difficult to take the buildings apart and the acidity of concrete actually turned out to corrode many metals

Sick buildings. We used to have to get mundic reports for buildings in the south west of a certain era. Involves drilling holes in the concrete and taking samples to check for various minerals to see if the building has cancer. 

They’ve identified the buildings made of the stuff, that’s not hard.

The hard part is then inspecting them. If you’ve got a hospital made of the stuff, you need to take down all the ceilings to check that nobody has drilled pipes through it, hung heavy M+E off it, it’s not already cracking, etc.

I suspect a view has been taken somewhere that it’s not worth the hassle of closing a hospital to take all the ceilings down to check. Which is fine, until you go in for an in-grown toenail and get crushed by falling concrete.

I reckon there’s going to be another Grenfell at some point with this stuff, in a building nobody really cares about but densely packed with people deemed to be unimportant.

Just picking up on Laz's reference above, I am convinced that there is a complete shit show coming our way in terms of school teachers and other public sector worker from the 60s and 70s getting sick from asbestos.  

 

Yeah, it’s starting to freak me out that my kid might be sitting in a classroom with a risk (how much is not really known but folk who know about this stuff are sounding the alarm) of catastrophic roof structure failure. 
“In 1982, production of RAAC in the UK stopped amid concerns over its structural performance and life expectancy, which was subsequently predicted by BRE to be around 30 years”. So lots of buildings where the main structural components are decades past their life expectancy. School have engaged with me a bit, local authority still stonewalling….

yes, a Grenfell style catastrophe is a potential - C4 news covered this last night but is anything going to happen before someone is killed?

This is good if you’re interested:

https://watts.co.uk/raac-and-ruin/

Another element which makes this v difficult is that it’s not easy to establish whether RAAC beams are degraded or not. 

 

If you have kids in schools - please send the head the link below and ask them (a) to confirm whether they have yet established whether RAAC is present in any school buildings - if they haven’t had a survey ask them to confirm when one will be carried out; (b) if it’s been established that RAAC is present - how are they proposing to manage the issue  

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reinforced-autoclaved-aerate…

 

Either the end suddenly shears off where it meets the vertical support and the whole plank comes down, or the plank gradually degrades, warps, cracks and then snaps.

You don’t get a warning about the first type of collapse and have to check how the building was put together to find out if it’s likely to happen. The second type of collapse is obvious and you will have time to stop it, but you do have to inspect all the planks every few years to check for signs.

thank you anonymouse - if one of those roofs does a “first type” collapse and crushes 20 primary school kids there will be more sense of urgency about the issue generally. an uncomfortable comparison because of the scale of the disaster in turkey - but similarly more attention now being paid in turkey to earthquake collapse mitigation in building codes (and implementation). 

reminds me of the collapse of the modern and seemingly robust CTV building during the Christchurch earthquake 

having been to christchurch a few years ago I was struck by how singularly they’ve failed to properly rebuild its city centre

and how bizarre the decision was not to eg save and rebuild the old cathedral

Similar age / issues are coming into play in a lot of infrastructure that was built post war. 
 

Another example is bridges.

The sheer scale of bridges that are hugely problematic is being thoroughly ignored by most governments globally. Many are carrying loads they were never designed for and most aren’t being inspected anywhere near regularly enough. 

 

What is currently happening india in this regard won’t be a ‘developing’ world problem for terribly much longer. 
 

For all these conspiracy nutters going on about these train derailments in the US being false flag/attacks on the US… the reality is that the train network infrastructure in the US has been thoroughly ignored for decades and is in a state of imminent collapse. 
 

We are just starting to see the beginning of the decline… 

 

 

 

when the “box girder” bridge technology - now ubiquitous - was new in the sixties there were lots of collapses weren’t there, mostly during construction - so something to do with the basic engineering not fatigue or wear and tear

the worst of these in terms of death toll was on your turf scylla - the West Gate bridge over the Yarra

There were also fatal collapses during construction at Cleddau in Wales and at Koblenz

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-doesnt-know-which-schools-are-at-risk-of-…
 

the number of buildings where this is a real issue might be very small - but we don’t know. establishing where RAAC exists and is a problem is not hugely difficult. I’d really like to be reassured that my son isn’t (right now) sitting under one of those roofs. if you have kids in school please raise this with the head and local authority: there is enough evidence of potential risk that an urgent assessment should be made as to the extent of the risk (probably and hopefully a very small number of high risk buildings). 

i have today discovered that no survey of my kid's school has been carried out because the local authority and the church of england are arguing about liability….. get the fvcking engineer’s survey done and then argue about liability! if my boy gets squashed because of the delay in getting the survey done…….. I will be getting medieval on a few asses

the law was explained to the local authority- without explicitly conceding liability they then asserted that they wouldn’t be commissioning a survey for my son’s school because the buildings were outside the at risk age range - that this was incorrect was explained them and - lo and behold - an engineer’s survey is now being commissioned. the local authority’s position has moved a long way in one working day…. what a fvcking shambles, no confidence. 

Local authorities are rotten boroughs ffs. Riddled with corruption. Slow. Poorly staffed. Lazy. Start a residents group. Have a whip round. Threaten to JR the authority. 

In the case of the Canterbury TV building that collapsed during the Christchurch earthquake the construction manager of the build had stolen the identity of a professional engineer and faked an engineering degree. There may be some connection.

 

Rotten boroughs, FYI, were those where the local bigwig had the ability to sidestep democratic vote and in effect appoint an MP. e.g because everybody who could vote in that borough owed their income and/or their home to the local bigwig. 

ah yes, let's wait until a few days before the new school year

In an escalation of the schools building safety crisis, the Department of Education has issued new advice – believed to have happened as recently as Thursday – stating that regardless of the assessed risk of a building made using reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) blocks, such buildings should be “taken out of use and mitigations should be implemented immediately”.

Official communications seen by the Guardian acknowledge that “this may come as a shock and is likely to cause disruption” but say “the safety of pupils, students and staff is our priority”.

The DfE declined to comment on claims that the number of schools with buildings using the problem material was above 100. The department is understood to be planning to make a statement imminently and education unions said they had been told that a formal announcement was due on Thursday afternoon.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/aug/31/english-schools-told-to-close-buildings-made-with-crumble-risk-concrete 

Two days before the school year is positively planful.

Remember during VuVu when they sent the kids back into school for a cvnting fvcking DAY before pulling them back out again?  Oh what japes!

this risk is seemingly a lot more real than the asbestos issues about which the sunday times is running a rather disgraceful YOUR KIDS WILL DIE OF HORRIBLE LUNGMELT!!! scare campaign at present. As per the above, statistically there is an issue with asbestos in schools (mainly a threat to teachers) but if there was going to be an epidemic of lungharm it would have been seen decades ago.

That said, if the RAAC ceiling collapses, that might free up some asbestos.

The silliest element of the sunday times campaign has been its suggestion that NET ZERO HORRIBLE WOKE NET ZERO is going to DISTURB ASBESTOS IN SCHOOLS!!! and MAKE YOUR KIDS DIE OF HORRIBLE LUNGMELT!!!

Some of the housings affected by the RAAC issue, eg Harrow Crown Court, are of serious importance as examples of midcentury civic architecture, and must be repaired whatever the cost.

 

you have to ask how proportionate it is to immediately close schools without adequate replacement facilities in place, as against instituting an urgent rolling repair programme 

how many RAAC buildings have so far COLLAPSED WITHOUT WARNING!?!?!?!?

There has been one collapse so far that I can find - the partial collapse of a staff room roof at a primary school in my manor, north Kent. Singlewell Primary School in Kent.

If, based on that, they are going to institute mass closures then it is absurd for the DofE to deny funding for replacement facilities. Totally absurd.

The issue seems to affect mainly primary schools - wonder why that is (as opposed to secondary). 

It seems RAAC is often used for flat roof panelling which means its collapse would be dangerous, as it’s overhead, but in such a situation it is not structural per se (rather, it will rest on the structure) and other flat roof solutions are fairly readily available

The kindest thing I've got to say about the current tozza gozza is that it isn't their fault a previous tozza gozza was thick enough 30-odd years ago to commission public service buildings of a material with such a short design life. 30yrs obsolescence built in FGS

Join the discussion

Login Register