Building regulators are stepping in over a dispute about whether commonly used earthquake braces are strong enough.
(Stock image) It remains unclear whether the regulators have determined whether there is a safety risk. Photo: 123rf.com
An official complaint was laid more than two years ago about some steel-anchor-and-cable braces] used to hold up ceilings, pipes and ducting.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment said a seismic engineering expert had now assessed the products, allowing it to weigh up the complaint, and it was writing to the manufacturer and distributor, which would have an opportunity to respond.
RNZ is unable to name the product or companies at this stage.
It remains unclear whether the regulators have determined whether there is a safety risk or not.
The Commerce Commission had asked the ministry to step in, partly because the rules were too vague and it wanted them clarified for the building industry.
In a statement the ministry said one reason the commission had not found evidence of a breach of the Fair Trading Act was that compliance requirements for non-structural seismic bracing products lacked "clarity".
The commission decided that "a lowered safety factor was unlikely in itself to have been substantively misleading to engineers specifying the product" but it had been concerned about how the product's strength was ascertained, especially about "the apparent lack of dynamic testing of the complete system", the ministry said.
A large proportion of the country's commercial buildings are widely acknowledged to have substandard or questionable non-structural seismic bracing.
A 2016 study found "the majority of non-structural elements inspected do not have adequate restraint".
The ministry has aimed for an upgrade of bracing to be led by the construction industry rather than legislated for.