Following the recent collapse of a block of apartments in Gwardamangia, Flimkien għal Ambjent Aħjar calls on the authorities to immediately reign in the issuance of building permits and to enact long-overdue reforms to stamp out malpractice and restrain cowboy developers.
Construction workers’ right to work in a safe environment has been ignored for years, leaving the construction sector with an abysmal track record for the highest rate of workplace injuries and deaths. The presence of many unqualified and untrained foreigners on building sites hampers communications and has led to many dangerous situations.
Minimum training standards on the part of contractors, coupled with the high demand is leading to a situation where persons with no experience, training or qualifications are running building sites or operating cranes, leading to poor standards of construction and serious accidents.
Cranes, construction vehicles and even lifts imported from overseas are often second-hand and not adequately inspected, which at the very least leads to vehicles belching toxic emissions, or worse, to accidents.
Lack of qualified and motivated staff at OHSA means that sites can’t be inspected as regularly as they should be. Similarly, the Building Regulation Office (BRO) which is responsible to ensure that the ‘Environmental Management of Construction Sites’ law is followed, is chronically under-staffed.
The police corps appears to lean towards developers, closing a blind eye to violations like works beginning before 7am, working on public holidays, failure to use vacuum attachments when grinding stone and failure to wash construction vehicles’ wheels when leaving a construction site, resulting in an increase in health problems triggered by dust pollution.
Contractors often fail to erect scaffolding, provide safety gear and take over pavements, leaving pedestrians including mothers with strollers and wheelchair users having to risk their lives on busy roads.
Cranes and heavy vehicles like concrete mixers block Malta’s streets without the necessary permits. Local councils often fail to coordinate works, issuing several permits that block traffic in several adjacent streets, leading to gridlock and adding to air pollution.
Architects contribute by caving in to developers’ demands to squeeze the maximum possible number of units into each site which has not only sacrificed design, aesthetic appeal and liveability of such projects, but also led to safety issues, as adequate supervision of building sites to ensure that regulations and method statements are being respected is lacking.
The ten fold increase in construction all over the island, without an equivalent increase of properly experienced and qualified staff at authorities like the BRO has meant that in spite of regulations to prevent damage to neighbours, such damage is rampant. Over the past years we have seen residents vacated from damaged buildings, which damage now culminated in the collapse of the apartment block in Guardamangia which miraculously did not result in injuries but made families instantly homeless and without any belongings.
Allowing developers to excavate within a metre or sometimes right up to the walls of neighbouring buildings has not only resulted in several structures collapsing but even in deaths. It has contributed to untold damage to neighbours’ properties all over the islands, often not compensated by the culprits.
Architects and developers should not be permitted to submit applications that violate long standing planning and environmental control norms, such as building on scheduled property or above height limitations. Tolerating such applications only encourages abuse and wastes huge sums of taxpayer funds to process applications which should never be granted.
Buildings under construction need to be completed within a prescribed shortest possible time, and all apertures sealed in order to avoid damage to neighbouring properties,
The only way to stamp out abuse is by proper planning, increasing checks and controls, and by making developers’ records available to the public so that ethical developers are rewarded, while repeat offenders should be heavily penalised. Until that is done we shall continue to see building site accidents and fatalities. The record of five construction accidents in one week just a month ago, coupled with the increased size and complexity of projects being undertaken, politicians’ lack of action to revise and implement construction legislation is irresponsible, if not criminal.
Allowing the Malta Developers Association to self-regulate, as has been suggested, is not an option. FAA maintains that rather than adding power, reach and members to the monopolistic MDA, Government should come down hard wherever an accident takes place, halting all work on that site immediately, whether investigations take a couple of days, a couple of weeks or months. This should be a deterrent for negligent developers, uncaring because they’ve paid a paltry sum as insurance covering third parties. Those who have succumbed cannot be brought back, as in the cases of the two women who had died at St Paul’s Bay, the elderly woman buried alive in Sliema, the Latvian worker at DB’s Seabank hotel, Maltese and other nationals in Sliema, St Julian’s and other locations.
All Residents have a right to a safe and peaceful existence which is being ruined by the huge increase in construction all over the island, a short-sighted policy on the part of the government which is not only affecting residents’ health and quality of life but also undermining tourism, the real mainstay of our economy.
The people have tolerated enough and the government must put the brakes on building developments until all safety and environmental rules and regulations are fully complied with.
