by Thom Zaremba, shareholder at Roetzel & Andress
In my last blog, we started by looking at the word “resilient” to answer the question, “What is a resilient building?” We found that, since buildings are multifaceted, determining if our buildings are “resilient” would require looking at their life cycle, from cradle to grave. How well do they age? Will they survive climate change? Are they sustainable, i.e., when a building dies, will its materials be recycled or end up in a landfill?
In this blog, we’ll examine the resilience of our existing building stock. To do so, we must determine where building code jurisdiction begins and ends.
Building code jurisdiction begins with issuing a building permit, which means that, on paper, the building appears to comply with building code requirements. Inspections are conducted at critical junctures throughout construction to ensure that it does. If it passes those inspections, an occupancy permit will be issued indicating that the building complies with minimum building code requirements to provide occupants with reasonable safety, health and general welfare. In most states, however, that’s where building code jurisdiction ends (except for fire code jurisdiction, which continues throughout a building’s life).
Why is that significant? As buildings age, they are no longer inspected to determine whether they continue to comply with minimum building code requirements. Does that really matter? It did when the 40-year-old Champlain Towers in Surfside, Florida, collapsed, killing nearly 100 occupants.
At the time of the Surfside collapse, Florida required some of its coastal buildings to be re-inspected 40 years after the issuance of an occupancy permit. Shouldn’t that have prevented the collapse? Unfortunately, while the re-inspection process at Surfside had begun and some problems were identified, the building failed and collapsed before being corrected.
The Surfside collapse raises the question: should all or, at least, some of our buildings be subjected to periodic, post-occupancy inspections? Equally important, what should be included in that inspection? Should it be limited to structural issues? Should mechanical or plumbing be included? What about energy? Should buildings be inspected for energy efficiency as they age?
The answer to these questions depends on the answer to a simpler question: How resilient do we want our buildings to be? Just as absolute power corrupts absolutely, age degrades buildings, absolutely. It not only degrades them structurally–all aspects of the building degrade over time, from their mechanical and plumbing components to their energy efficiency.
Let’s take windows in a building as an example. Fifty years ago, double-pane or insulating windows weren’t widely used in buildings. Virtually all the windows were monolithic, with metal or wood frames. While monolithic windows with metal or wood frames keep the rain out, they don’t keep warm air in buildings very well in winter or hot air in summer. As a result, thermal losses in cold climates were astronomical and thermal gains in warm climates were unbearable. Furthermore, many of those same windows can still be found in buildings throughout the country today. Moreover, it is possible they could remain in those buildings almost indefinitely!
Should buildings be inspected periodically, including their energy efficiency? YES, of course, they should!
Why? Every few years, the Energy Codes (ASHRAE 90.1 and the International Energy Conservation Code) update their requirements, making them increasingly more stringent. As a result, new buildings constructed using them are more energy efficient. But what about our existing building stock? Because there are no post-occupancy inspections, whether for energy code compliance or otherwise, in most States, windows are rarely upgraded and only if the building owner chooses to replace them. How does this affect overall energy consumption and energy conservation?
As of 2022, there were approximately 5.9 million commercial buildings in the U.S., with new construction making up less than 2% of that total. Since our energy codes generally only apply to new construction, increasing their stringency every couple of years only affects +/-2% of buildings, which has little to virtually no effect on reducing total energy consumption.
In my view, periodic inspections of our buildings, including their energy efficiencies, are critical to the life span resiliency of the buildings we live and work in.
In my next blog, we’ll examine the potential cost impact of periodic building inspections and try to answer the difficult question: Would post-occupancy inspections worth the cost?