Identifying Structural Hazards in Building Construction Projects

Abstract

Building failure incidents are occurring within the Netherlands and these incidents can be a valuable source of technical data regarding improvements in structural safety. This research has attempted to utilize this information gained to develop a tool to aid the building construction sector in identifying hazards during building construction projects. For that purpose, this research has investigated risk assessments and structural failure incidents. To be able to develop a tool, deeper knowledge of risk assessments is required and therefore risk assessments were studied to understand how they should be performed and what characteristics makes them effective. The research of Terwel (2012) on the Cobouw database formed the basis for the analysis of structural failure incidents. This thesis investigated how other research used structural failure databases to improve structural safety and studied the data available from the Cobouw database for developing a tool. The analysis of risk assessments has shown that identifying hazards is a crucial step in the assessment process. It was concluded that it would be beneficial to a project team if it had information on which hazards related to structural failure can occur, the probability of occurrence of hazards and the possible impact they can have. An investigation into structural failure databases showed that no other research could provide a tool that fulfilled the above requirements and in addition it was concluded that the database available to this research was only sufficient to provide information on which hazards can occur. There was not enough data available to make a justified estimate regarding the consequences of a hazard or probability of occurrence. Therefore it was chosen to use a different approach to analyze the database. The Cobouw database has been restructured into a fault tree format, to relate hazards to specific components of a building structure. Afterwards an attempt was made to discover why many hazards have occurred or which building components were prone to hazards. There was not enough data available to draw conclusions on that subject either. Finally this research concluded that the most efficient way of developing a tool, from the data available to this research, is to create a guide which can be used during the design phase to caution the project team about frequently occurring hazards. The method that was used to create the tool can also be used as an inspiration for future research, because this research was limited not only by the amount of available incidents, but also by the source of the incidents, which was from a news site that would most likely not focus on low-profile failure incidents and the reporting of precise technical details. Therefore the most important recommendation this research has, is to introduce a large scale collaboration in the construction industry focused on gathering accurate data on structural failure incidents.