Why we should aim at zero building (human) inspections

Let’s face it: almost nobody cares about building inspections. Building inspections sound like something bureaucratic, with little or no real value for the average citizen. However, the negligence in these inspections can even lead to death. For example, the elevator, which is recognized as the most secure mean of transportation [1], has been the cause of three deaths since 2011 only in NYC [2]. In all these cases, a better building inspection system could have avoided those deaths, since the terrible incidents were caused by a malfunction in the elevator, one of the items checked during the inspections.

Obviously, it is impossible to anticipate which elevator specifically is about to have a severe malfunction that could harm someone. However, it is possible to focus the attention of the reduced workforce responsible for inspections to more problematic buildings, as NYC did with its Fire Department: “The system uses a risk-based model to track, score, prioritize and then automatically schedule a building for inspection” [3].

Looking further in the future, we can dream of a fully automatized inspection system, with zero human inspections. Depending on an Australian company, this future is now. “We’re looking at technologies whereby we can put smart sensors and augmented reality into the building structure itself,” said the company’s IT manager. [4]

Although it sounds too much of “sci-fi”, as we know the costs of adapting 1 million-plus buildings, picking only NYC as an example [5], we can start thinking of adding sensors, little by little, so we won’t need timely inspections anymore, since the buildings will be reporting its situation 24x7 in real-time.

*The image from this post is from the NYC’s PLUTO data set, take a look clicking here.

[1] https://www.premierliftgroup.co.uk/platform-lifts/insights/safe-elevators-for-transport/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/nyregion/nyc-elevator-death-accident.html
[3] https://gcn.com/articles/2013/08/01/fdny-data-analytics.aspx
[4] https://www.zdnet.com/article/taylor-looking-at-embedding-sensors-and-smarts-in-concrete/
[5] https://ny.curbed.com/2018/4/23/17271092/manhattan-buildings-data-visualization-taylor-baldwin#targetText=There%20are%20more%20than%201,and%20all%20manner%20of%20types.