Lightweight construction: Product liability?
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The image above is from the report looking into the LODD death of Prince William County’s Kyle Wilson. The large home’s lightweight construction was cited as one of the major factors leading to this tragedy.
On Tuesday, Mike Ward, under the title Suburban Slums, looked at a couple of angles involving the so called “McMansions” that firefighters need to recognize. Mike ended his column for FireGeezer this way:
Wilson’s mayday was issued six minutes after the arrival of the first arriving company. The assumption was that the occupants were still in the house. Components of the house collapsed as the primary search was underway.
If there are McMansions in your district, maybe it is time to preplan them as you would a large commercial building. These may be the high hazard life safety target hazards in your first alarm district.
As many of you know Azarang Mirkhah is the Fire Protection Engineer for the City of Las Vegas Department of Fire & Rescue and a Firehouse.com contributing editor. Ozzie has written an article called What’s It Going To Take? It discusses a+ variety of ways for the fire service to address the problems associated with lightweight construction techniques. But most interesting may be his view that this is a product liability issue whose victims are firefighters. Here is an excerpt:
It might not be now, but then maybe 10-15 years from now, just like the GM case with their gas tank fires, or the Ford and Firestone case, where failures of a single component of the overall product resulting in fatalities; there could be litigation brought against the truss manufacturers, homebuilders, and even the building officials, by the families of the fallen firefighters who lost their lives or got injured in fires as a result of the lightweight construction failures under the fire conditions.
I have a feeling that similar to the Ford and Firestone litigation, we would see a lot of finger pointing between all players involved. The wood truss manufacturers and the homebuilders would probably try to dodge any liabilities by claiming that they were not one the ones who wrote the building construction codes. As bogus as that might sound, they would claim that they were just manufacturing those wood trusses, and building those houses, merely in full compliance with the adopted building code. And, as a matter of fact, they don’t even have the smallest say in the code development process, since they don’t even have the right to vote on the building code proposals; and that the building officials have the exclusive right to vote on the building code proposals. So they would toss the ball into the building officials’ court.
The building officials on the other hand, would probably claim that type of engineered lightweight wood construction for the floor and roof assemblies were the dominant method of construction and the industry standards and practice all across the country, for the very many years. But then remember, so was using asbestos and the lead-based paints in homes all across the land for decades, right? And what happened then Building codes are not Bibles. The building construction codes were proven to be wrong before, and have exposed many Americans to health hazards. Are asbestos and lead-based paints allowed in the building code now? No. Would the building officials be liable if they allow those same dominant construction practices of the previous years now? Sure they would.
Read Azarang Mirkhah’s entire article
As usual STATter 911 is interested in responsible opposing viewpoints. You can contact me at dstatter@wusa9.com.
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