Firefighting investigators claim product certification is being fraudulently altered

FIREFIGHTERS who investigated one of Australia’s worst residential building blazes say product certification is being fraudulently altered.

The fire damaged apartment complex 'Lacrosse'. Picture: Steve Tanner

FIREFIGHTERS who investigated one of Australia’s worst residential building blazes say product certification is being fraudulently altered.

The alarming claim was made yesterday by Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade acting deputy chief officer Adam Dalrymple, who told a Senate inquiry the changes were occurring without the manufacturers’ knowledge.

“If there’s documentation that suggests a (building product) is right and it isn’t, that’s fraud,” A/DCO Dalrymple said before a Melbourne hearing into non-conforming building products.

He also said it was “disappointing” and “somewhat surprising” that it had taken so long for there to be action after the November 2014 inferno at Docklands’ LaCrosse apartment complex, a fire he later described as unlike anything seen before in Australia.

Cladding was blamed for the fire at the 'Lacrosse' apartment in Melbourne. Picture: Steve Tanner

The MFB found the fire had spread through 14 storeys in 15 minutes after the building’s external cladding ignited.

The cladding did not comply with combustibility requirements for a high-rise building and contributed to the spread of the fire.

A/DCO Dalrymple told News Corp Australia the MFB had put together a proposal for reform after the LaCrosse blaze but none of it had been adopted prior to the Grenfell Tower inferno in London, in which at least 80 people died in June.

“A lot of work is getting done right now,” he had earlier said at the Senate inquiry.

“The tragedy of Grenfell has really sharpened the focus. That work should have been done two and a half years ago.”

He also told News that when the MFB is part of a building approval it has to use its own people to check that everything is as it should be because “there is no require for fire safety engineers to sign off their work to say ‘I designed it this way and what has been built is in accordance’.”

Senate inquiry chairman, Labor’s Chris Ketter, told News: “There is fraud going on out there.

“We have a Byzantine system of regulation and regulators where you have everybody pointing at somebody else.

“What I’d like to see is people who are laying awake at night because they know there are personal consequences to them if a non-compliant product is used.

“But that’s not happening. It’s too easy to pass the buck,” Senator Ketter said.

“Going forward we have to have a proper system of accountability.”