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The roof of our large apartment complex is covered in large stones. Over several years, birds attracted to the stones have regularly dropped them over the side of the roof and the stones have caused damage to parked cars, furniture, and chipped glass door and window panels.
However, of more concern is the serious injury or death the stones could cause if they hit someone whilst on their balcony. In response to questions about solving this problem, our Executive Committee has replied by saying they have investigated solutions to preventing the birds from landing on the roof, but as the stones are an accepted building method and since they are covered by insurance, it has been decided the cost of a remedy is too high and no further action will be taken. This is despite the risk to the safety of owners when using their balconies (those that extend beyond the roof line).
Have other forum members come across this problem and found a solution? As a safety issue, I would have thought that Executive Committee is obliged to take reasonable precautions to provide a safe living environment?
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The response by your executive committee is exactly the same as ours! One must reflect on whether it is the same EC?
A nylon netting over the stones [such as that used for swimming poolcovers] would not be prohibitively expensive. The strata budget on our building is in excess of half a mill per year.
Let us be realistic about this. It is a very sad commentary on society . The large majority of owners/tenants,and the EC , are simply indifferent to the problems and safety of a few persons at a lower level of the building.
What is really sickening is that the insurance company, which is well aware of the issue and public safety aspects involved but is happy to pay out a few thousand dollars per year on claims for damage to windows, etc, so as to continue to draw in a premium of some ten times their annual payout.
Their greed and arrogance is only exceeded by their ignorance.If a person was injured ,either on one of he balconies or on the street below ,and they sued the Body Corporate ,the insurance company would not pay out because they would argue that it was recognisable problem that the EC deliberately ignored .
The litigant would seek ‘discovery’ of the Body Corporate minutes and extensive correspondence and the Court would award damages against the entire building which would amount to upwards of $5000 per apartment.
[See T-World's original post HERE – JT]
We had an issue that required some money to fix a serious safety issue. The EC (of which I was part) recognised the danger and the need to address it urgently. We decided we had no choice but to go ahead and make the necessary repairs using part of the contingency component of our sinking fund which had ample reserves. An AGM came around before work had commenced so the budget being presented included the amount that was needed. One owner had been on the EC a decade earlier when evidence of the now-dangerous damage had first become apparent. The EC at the time decided to not act due to some poor advice from the former managing agent. He advised that it was an issue between two owners but if he had consulted the unit plan he would have known this was incorrect. One of the relevant owners pointed that out at the time (in writing) but this was ignored.
Anyway, what had been a smaller problem in the 1990s had got a lot worse last year, quickly becoming dangerous, and come to the attention of an entirely new EC. The former EC member sent notes to all owners decrying the ignorance and inappropriate spending of the more recent EC. This EC asked a strata specialist lawyer to provide written answers to a series of questions on the matter. One was “What liabilities would the owners corporation have been exposed to if the EC had not acted promptly on first becoming aware of this issue?” The answer detailed the considerable penalties for ‘failure to comply with a safety duty-general’ and ‘negligent exposure to substantial risk of serious harm’, let alone what we might have be liable for if someone had actually been hurt or killed. It was very useful to be able to read out the lawyer’s answers to this and other questions at the AGM. Many people had come to the meeting unsure what to think. In the end only two people in the room did not vote approving the works and the budget.
It was ridiculous that we even had to go to legal opinions to confirm for the owners that the EC was being proper and responsible but sometimes it helps to cut through the nonsense.
If your EC is intransigent perhaps you could get a group of other owners to agree to chip in for a simple letter from a lawyer. The more work you do, the less the lawyer has to and do the cheaper it should be IE ask the right series of questions with all the necessary information provided.
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