Tim Lohmann Introduces CROSS

CROSS is a scheme for the confidential reporting of structural safety issues.
If you are concerned about a structural safety issue then it can be reported through their website and your report will form part of an international community of these reports. This enables decision makers and code developers to respond to trends in industry that cannot be reported or addressed elsewhere. CROSS is supported by the HSE, ICE and IStructE as well as the Building Safety Regulator.

CROSS consists of two sets of teams, there is the management team, along with their wider roles, take in the reports and anonymise them, they ask the expert panels for their views and then bring them together to generate the legally checked reports. The other teams are expert panels of volunteers who review the anonymised reports and make comments which are summarised into draft reports which are again reviewed by the experts before going for publication. There are two expert teams - one of structural engineers and one of fire engineers.

You may ask what relevance this has to the membership of the IDE and the wider demolition community. My view is that an understanding of building safety issues is fundamental to the practice of engineering in the built environment and particularly in high risk environments such as demolition. The CROSS reports give us an opportunity to see what might be going wrong elsewhere but also to reflect on what might be going on in our own specialised sector.

I would encourage all members to look at the CROSS website occasionally, there is a link to it here. There is also an opportunity to subscribe to their newsletter which gives a summary of current issues and reports. I’d also suggest that where we see potentially dangerous structural situations we use the reporting to identify these and hopefully provide advice to others on how to avoid them.

The IDE, as a professional engineering body, is looking to enhance the status of our members by working alongside the engineering council to get accreditation. If we can demonstrate engagement of our members with initiatives such as CROSS it will only help that process.