Engineering Council cries for resources to enforce building regulations

By Edward Acquah

Accra, July 3, GNA – The Engineering Council of Ghana has asked for adequate resources to effectively exercise its supervisory role and ensure compliance to the country’s building regulations.

Following the recent collapse of three storey buildings under construction in some parts of the country, the Council said it had put together a team to conduct spot inspections at construction sites – but the team’s deployment had delayed due to the lack of resources.

The Council regulates the practice of engineering and provide for regulated matters to secure the highest professional standards in the practice of the engineering.

In an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Mr Wise Ametefe, the Registrar of the Council, mentioned transport logistics, and allowances for the inspection team as among the major resources required to execute the nationwide inspection exercise.

He said the team would educate contractors where necessary and would also be empowered to halt any project that did not complied with engineering rules and had the potential to endanger lives.

“The team will go to the sites unannounced and conduct spot checks and find out if the right materials are being used and the right things are being done.

“We want this nationwide exercise to be sustained but we are yet to go to the sites because we do not have the resources,” he said.

The country, within a space of two weeks (May this year), recorded four separate cases of collapse of storey buildings under construction, three of which occurred in the Greater Accra Region and one in the Northern Region.

Subsequently, four spate team of investigators drawn from the Ghana Institute of Architects, Ghana Institute of Planners, Ghana Institution of Engineering, and the Ghana Institution of Surveyors was deployed to investigate the cause of the disaster.

Mr Ametefe said the Council would meet the investigators in Accra on Thursday, July 6, 2023, to get an update on their work.

“This is a forensic investigation. They must pick information from the site, take the data to the lab and do the testing to find out the efficacy of the work done, and all these take a lot of time,” he said.

Meanwhile, preliminary investigations by the Engineering Council had cited poor supervision particularly on the part of Assemblies as a major contributory factor to the collapse of the buildings under construction.

The Council said preliminary investigations at the disaster sites had revealed that the owners of the buildings either did not obtain permits or extended the buildings beyond what was approved.

In the case of the Bortianor church building incident, the Council said preliminary investigations had showed that there were “a lot of flaws in the construction”.

GNA

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