Hundreds of Vic blocks rotting from inside

File this under “unintended consequences”: nearly half of the 359 apartment blocks in Victoria that had their cladding checked and replaced under a state program have been found to have serious unrelated structural and waterproofing defects.

The defects range from deterioration of the structural integrity of the buildings to the presence of potentially health harming mould.

It is exactly two years since we highlighted an ABC report that said there was a problem of cladding affected buildings “rotting from the inside” in Victoria, problems that were largely unknown partly because they were well-hidden and rarely if ever reported in the media when discovered.

Now the truth is out;  as of May 2023, of the 359 buildings that had combustible cladding, with remediation conducted by Cladding Safety Victoria (CSV), nearly 50 per cent also have significant non-cladding defects.

These include structural, fixing and sealing and water ingress problems, often related to balconies, and of these nearly 80 per cent were identified to have water/moisture related structural damage, which are indicators of the presence of mould.

“The program … provided a unique opportunity to examine the performance of external wall systems behind the external layer of cladding,’ says a CSV report.

And this is bad news for apartment owners in older buildings in Victoria, with CSV saying it has compiled a significant body of data that highlights extensive non-cladding defects, remediation of which must be funded by owners.

The $600 million CSV program was set up to reduce the risk associated with combustible cladding on residential apartment buildings across the state.

The extent of the discovered defects  problem is covered in more detail in  CSV’s research analysis which you can read by downloading the document HERE.

But it raises the question, if half the buildings with combustible cladding have unrelated defects, what about all the apartment blocks that don’t have dangerous cladding and therefore were not investigated?

Needless to say, the developer-friendly Melbourne media is, as ever, silent on apartment block defects. Here are three videos from the CSV report.