The Subbie Must Have Had a Screw Loose!
 The Scene: Green Point, Cape Town.
The Time: One balmy evening in 2004.
The Occasion: The birthday party of Mr De Bruin.
The Venue: The house owned by Mr Pienaar.
The Main Contractor: Mr Classen.
The Subbie: Mr Lamberts.
The Disaster: The collapse of a balcony.
The Injured parties: Mr De Bruin and Mr Sloep.
The ones who benefited: The lawyers (as usual).
What spoiled the birthday party was that the screws affixing the balcony to the wall pulled out.
The balcony folded over, rather like a hinge, dumping the birthday boy and Mr Sloep.
They sued the house owner, the main contractor and his subbie, and won in the Cape High Court. All defendants were found liable jointly and severally. The house owner and the main contractor appealed to the Appeal Court in Bloemfontein. That court agreed with them and said Yes, only the subbie was liable and that the injured parties now had to pay the legal costs of the house owner and his main contractor for the appeal. If you think about it, that’s unfair, isn’t it, since it was the judgment in the Cape High Court which was wrong! The law is quite clear on the issue of the subbie being responsible unless he is working under the control of the main contractor, so the injured plaintiffs’ attorneys should not have sued the owner and the main contractor. But they did. Had the Cape High Court judge made the correct decision, which he didn’t, the injured plaintiffs would have had to pay the owner’s and the main contractor’s legal costs in that court, but instead they had to pay more expensive Appeal Court costs. If the judge in the first court gave a wrong order, shouldn’t the State have to pay the difference between the High Court and the Appeal Court costs? What about their attorneys who gave them bad advice? Here some innocent folk have been injured and they end up having to pay extra legal costs! There’s something in our legal system which needs reviewing.
But back to that unhappy birthday celebration. What went wrong? The house owner decided, contrary to the original design incorporating pillars, that he didn’t like the pillars. Cantilevered balconies are quite common nowadays, so that sounds OK. The subbie in fact did change the design to incorporate a knee brace. But then he decided, at the last minute, to use coach screws instead of rawl bolts. Bad mistake! The coach screws penetrated the plaster to a depth of only 70mm, encased within the plastic plugs hammered into the drill holes. Rawl bolts would have expanded within the holes to give a better grip. The disaster ended up costing the subbie (or his insurers) a great deal of money. It provided a lot of fees for the lawyers. But most of all, it really spoilt a great party in Green Point that evening.
No plans were submitted to the local authorities for the balcony. This disregard for the law meant that someone in authority who was checking such things might have changed the design or inspected the works upon completion. While the appeal court made light of the omission, and held that there was no causal connection between the failure to lodge plans and the actual collapse of the balcony, one cannot rule out the possibility that a building inspector might have found fault with the balcony and identified its weakness had he conducted a physical inspection pursuant to the submission of plans. The building regulations are there for a purpose, and the court lost an opportunity to drive home the point that compliance with the building regulations is actually quite important.
The moral of the story:
Lodge your building plans, use the right screws, and employ only contractors and subbies who are members of Master Builders.
Clive Hill | Financial Services Manager |
