Nairobi’s building codes
A building collapsed in
NAIROBI, Kenya — A five-story building collapsed Monday in central Nairobi with more than 280 construction workers inside, killing at least 10 people and injuring more than 60, witnesses and officials said.
After the tragedy, many show up:
Tens of thousands of people ran to the site, clogging roads and climbing atop the debris to watch the rescue. Riot police deployed to the area began using truncheons to beat back the crowds and to clear roads for emergency vehicles.
But before a tragedy, who watches out for the risk?
One of the construction workers said that 280 men were on the site. Another, who would not give his name, said an inspector had warned last week that the structure was unsafe and they were trying to stabilize the building.
Indeed, the tragedy was both preventable and ghoulishly foreseen:
“We saw the building sink slowly and then sway from side to side. As we saw this, we fled the area. We never got that far — it collapsed,” said Serengo Wekesa, who had been working at a neighboring building.
Tut, we tut, where are the building inspectors? The answer is more difficult than we would like.
I was in
Typical self-built house, Mavoko,
Nothing stops the self-builders from going not just out but up, from one story:
Typical self-built house, Mavoko,
To two:
New construction walkup flats, Mavoko,
Or higher:
Residential over retail/ commercial … and building higher?
And then to five:
New construction, Mlolongo,
I photographed this building on my way to visit a housing savings co-operative.
Members of the housing savings co-op gathering for their meeting.
Its shape fascinated me, for it was not only self-built but self-designed. (I was too polite — or was it politeness? — to say anything about it.) There was no single right angle anywhere I could see. And it was all built with cement, adobe, reinforced with bamboo and reeds.
Settling down to business.
The houses are built because they are needed. They are self-built because their builders’ sole wealth is their labor. They are uninspected because the country is vast, and the builders (and home owners) don’t want inspectors, whom they associate with at best delay, at worst extortion and bribes.
So the homes go up. But as they do, their builders and buyers take a risk.
Stone — and even more so, mud adobe — is a highly limited building material. It lacks structure so to provide wall stability, it must be thick. That means weight, and very swiftly mud, brick, and stone reach a physical height limit. Old castles and palaces have enormously thick walls — six and eight and even twelve feet at the base — simply so the lower walls can bear the load of the floors above.
Even cathedrals, built with brick and smooth marble, were notorious deathtraps for their builders. Flying buttresses were invented to provide lateral bracing.
Flying buttress, schematic: the key is the bracing without excess stone.
Flying butresses, Notre Dame de Paris, apse
Reinforced concrete, and structural re-bar, enabled us to go up and up. Lacking such technology, buildings have a physical maximum height. Exceed it at your peril.
We, from our comfortable offices and high-rise apartments, would never take such a risk; indeed, we demand building inspectors and we rely on their Certificates of Occupancy; we take their validity for granted. We also live much longer and have large disposable wealth to buy quality housing. In
Finally, what is the value of a building inspector? As the Economist put it:
It is impossible to measure corruption precisely, but Transparency International, a Berlin-based lobby, still rates Kenya as one of the world’s most corrupt countries, on a par with
In a country where corruption is ‘merely rampant’ (to quote the Economist) …
In TI’s latest league table, corruption in Kenya was found to have improved from “highly acute” to merely “rampant”, prompting local newspapers to demand to know why foreign companies were not flocking back to set up new ventures in Kenya.
The answer is that “rampant” is not quite good enough.
… the inspectors may have been paid to look the other way.
Kibera,
I have been told, for instance, that more than half of the Kibera slums are owned by the same civil servants whose offices are now corruption-free zones.
Houses overlooking Kibera. I was told slumlords lived there, surveying their investments.
UPDATE: When there is a natural disaster, who comes to help?
Two people were pulled from the rubble on Tuesday, more than 20 hours after the collapse. At least three others were heard beneath the rubble, according to an Israeli rescue team helping with the operation along with 22
“We have found three people … and we are going to save them, and we hope there are more,” said Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Gershon, leader of the 140-member Israeli team made up of soldiers and other rescuers.
