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Opal Tower (built 2018) - Sydney, Australia - Major Structural Failure

Jonny5

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Wondering if anyone has thoughts on what happened to the Opal Tower Condominium building in Sydney Australia? It's a brand new 38 floor tower. On the 24th some residents of the building reported hearing loud "banging and screeching" noises and some cracks starting to show up on internal walls.

The fire department elected to evacuate the building, but later decided on only a partial evacuation. Apparently, they determined an internal concrete wall was failing but the columns supporting the tower were not affected.

There's a lot of confusion. Most involved in the reporting have zero expertise in building engineering and are using conflicting terms.

Obviously something went very wrong with the construction of at least one floor of the tower, but what really is the reason?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-46671811

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The building fault, reported by residents who heard "cracking noises", caused the 33-storey tower to move up to 2 millimetres and left doors jammed shut on Monday.

While most of the residents in the Australian tower were eventually allowed to return home on Monday night, occupants of 51 apartments were forced to spend Christmas Eve elsewhere and have not been allowed to return.
 
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We can say from our initial assessment there is no evidence of any issues with the foundations of the building, though we believe that there are a number of design and construction issues that require further investigation

What a mess. All residents have been forced out for several days now while they try and figure out what is causing the walls to crack, and if there is in fact a design flaw with the tower, or if there was a major defect with the construction.

Following the Opal Tower issues, the NSW Government announced a crackdown on dodgy building certifiers.
 
This case is going to expose the underbelly of the construction industry, and for what it's worth, the entire economic & business model of development.

There's a good article in the Australian Financial Review about the culture of not-paying invoices on time to subbies which in turn puts pressure on the subbie to cut corners - the investigation into Opal is ongoing and possibly not related to this, but I'm guessing a lot of sunshine is about to be nestle over the industry.
 

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