At least 14 people have died while many more are feared to have been trapped under rubble after an unfinished building collapsed in the southwestern Iranian city of Abadan on Monday.
Parts of the 10-story Metropol building, located in Abadan, a major oil refining hub in Khuzestan Province, collapsed, IRNA reported.
The under-construction building was located on Abadan’s busiest street where commercial, medical and office buildings predominate. The cause of the collapse is under investigation.
The construction supervisor of Metropol had explicitly and with technical reasoning warned about the building’s structural weakness.
“Authorities should have stopped work, but no one listens to an upright supervisor in a corrupt system,” says Beitollah Sattarian, professor of the School of Architecture at the University of Tehran, in an article for the Persian daily Hamshahri. A translation of the text follows:
The whole mechanism of construction in Iran is wrong; within this system, all buildings might have different levels of structural defects. Corruption might occur at any stage and easily remain hidden until the day a building collapses and a catastrophe takes place.
When it comes to the construction of a building, there’s an employer willing to spend money to advance their project, the municipality is in charge of giving out permits; there is a construction supervisor and there are other organizations like the fire department.
Corruption might occur at any stage during the process and all these players might be involved in a corrupt act. The point is there is no strategy to protect the construction process, as all policing methods are doomed.
The more we tighten the rules and regulations, the more corruption expands, because only one malefactor is sufficient to derail the whole process. The problem is that instead of taking lessons from the world and getting rid of policing strategies, we opt for dysfunctional methods that have failed time and again. What does the world do?
Insurance companies have joined the construction process in developed countries; buildings that fail to comply with safety measures are not used at all. What if the insurance company engages in corrupt practices? Within this mechanism, a minimum of quality and safety is adhered to. The higher the index, the lower will be insurance costs, therefore owners and builders will be incentivized to put up a better performance. What do they do to preempt corruption between the owner and the insurance company?
Unlike Iran, real-estate development and insurance industries in other countries won’t make profit even if only a fraction of the process gets involved in bribery and corrupt practices. If an insured building is demolished by a company, the cost of insurance compensation would be so high that the company will go bankrupt.
In the case of large buildings, the violation of rules and regulations might even lead to the bankruptcy of an insurance company. Several insurance companies must intervene to gain both the power of insurance coverage and oversight to prevent fixing.
In other words, all our problems in the construction sector will be solved if we follow the footsteps of developed countries.
In Iran, there isn’t any insurance company to carry out the tasks of monitoring, examining and approving the soil and foundation and other details regarding the quality of the building. This is a very large business sector for the insurance industry. It could create jobs and prevent all our current troubles, but it seems that now we are resorting to policing strategies.
It is not possible to determine the likelihood of violation in the current mechanism; nobody knows about the construction process, soil analysis, excavation, foundation, etc. We do not have any valid account of the various stages of construction and insurance companies are not mandated to take responsibility for our buildings’ safety.
This is the missing link in our construction sector and therefore, we can’t guarantee the quality and safety of buildings.
