Editorial

Citation

Hoxley, M. (2005), "Editorial", Structural Survey, Vol. 23 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ss.2005.11023caa.001

Editorial

I am not usually a superstitious person and normally think nothing of walking under ladders or spotting a lone magpie. However I will definitely think twice before travelling abroad at Christmas this year. The disaster that befell the indigenous peoples of the Asian Indian Ocean coastline and their visitors on Boxing Day 2004 made horrific viewing for those of us who sat transfixed in front of our televisions watching the consequences of the tsunami. Many of us will have had friends and relatives who were on holiday in the region and some may have perished in the tidal-wave. The huge loss of life was all the more distressing given the previous warnings that had been made about the consequences of building on many of the shorelines. This disaster followed on exactly 12 months to the day from the earthquake in Bam, Iran. About 26,000 people lost their lives in Bam and the city was devastated. The paper in this issue by Mehrabian and Haldar provides an insight into the structural damage suffered and lessons learned for redevelopment in the area. Let us pray that next Boxing Day does not see any similar catastrophe.

The rush to prefabricate

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Building Research Establishment are both making a great deal of noise about off-site fabrication being an important solution to the need to provide thousands of houses in the south-east (and also for a massive public building programme). Let us hope that in 40 to 50 years time the BRE are not writing a book on how to identify and repair this non-traditional housing (see Harrison et al., in this issue). The paper by the research team from the BRE gives a flavour of what can be found in their new comprehensive work on the identification and assessment of non-traditional UK housing built before the 1960s. This text is likely to become the standard work on the subject and a constant source of reference for many surveyors and home inspectors.

Asia and Oceania

Continuing the international flavour of this issue is a paper by Wilkinson and Russell on the demand for building surveyors down under. Their paper will be of interest to both practitioners and providers of surveying education in Oceania. The paper by Tommy Lo and colleagues looks at the predominant form of roof construction in Hong Kong. Following detailed surveys of 20 case study buildings the paper discusses roof and parapet defects of medium-rise buildings in sub-tropical climates. The final paper is by Alan Richardson of the University of Newcastle and continues a series of papers on fibre-reinforced concrete.

Mike Hoxley