[bruce511]

>> But it’s not clear to me that all code requirements are life- or safety-critical.

It depends somewhat on your definition of "critical. The 50s didn't have seat belts, and clearly most people survived. So "few" died in cars that there was opposition to year introduction.

I was recently in a country where smoke alarms are not "a thing". As is no-one had one, they simply don't exist. Sure there's the odd residential fire , but they're rare - single digits per year. Ladders kill more people than fire, but we sell a ladder to anyone, and you don't need a degree to climb one.

Building regulations are an important way of keeping people safe. They're a stamp of quality to buyers. Unfortunately they also seem to want to cover 100% of all cases all the time. And that final 0.01% is expensive, and time consuming. Which delays, or denies projects. Which results in fewer places to live. Which, dare I suggest, leads to homeless deaths.

Safety standards -are- important. Buildings falling down, or going up in flames, is obviously really bad. But equally not-building-at-all is dangerous. And regulators seem to give very little weight to that when adding another regulation.

[lostlogin]

Your view is a common one, but the flip side of that is cost.

Ask someone to make a flood, earthquake and fireproof building and they can price it up and decide if they want to proceed.

One maimed human from an accident/incident/event that could have been prevented, and the cost can dwarf the expense of building better.

The Pacific rim is somewhere that is fairly prone to natural disasters. Here in NZ, an earthquake in Christchurch [1] killed 185 people, 115 of them in a single building that didn’t meet the building code. If that building’s defects were known, and it had been classed a work of art, that makes the situation worse in my view.

As others have noted, you can make old buildings safer. Can’t they do that?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake

[bruce511]

I suspect we're both arguing the same thing - that some level of regulation is important.

Clearly if you are in an earthquake zone then earthquake protection are high on the list. If you are on a flood plain, then flooding needs to be managed send so on.

Now for my next part, I run the risk of being flippant. That's not my goal. Clearly the building code failed those 115 people, and their loss is 115 families in mourning. But, and I say this with all due contrition, that "only" 185 people died is a measure of regulation success, not failure. One building collapsed, but most survived (at least enough for people to get out safely.)

No doubt that building will be learned from, and there will be efforts to make every building perfectly safe. As you point out some building may be too expensive to rehabilitate.

Should those buildings be demolished? It's easy to count the dead from one gat fell down. It's harder to count the deaths from no-building, or a demolished building.

Obviously in an earthquake zone, earthquake regs are critical. No argument there.

But what about a million small regs that add up to real cost, but offer minimal gains? Each seems, in isolation, to be Important, but their collective protection seems marginal.

Again, it can seem cavalier to say "good enough", when "perfect" saves lives. Its easy to count lives cost with "good enough". It's harder to count lives lost to "perfect".

[mantas]

If we know the building was not up to code, we already learned those lessons. Didn’t we? The only lesson left is to, maybe, enforce the code?

[bruce511]

That's one interpretation. The other is that the building predated to code, and it was impossible, or too expensive, to retrofit the building.

Alas I do not live in Christchurch so I can't comment to this specific case. However, in general new buildings are subject to new codes, where old buildings may not be.

[mantas]

In that case there are no lessons to learn. Aside from GTFO from such grandfathered buildings if you can.