Waterproofing Challenges in High-Rise.If you go around any housing society – high-rise or low-rise – and take a look at the external walls and projections, I am sure that in more than 90% of the buildings you will find large patches of water seepage on the walls. You will find wet patches in the interior walls of some of the apartments as well. And you will also find water dripping in many of the building’s basements.
Why does this happen? Don’t the builders, developers, contractors, and owners take care of waterproofing? If they do, then what kind of waterproofing does the contractor use? Do they use a professional water-proofer, if at all?
In most of the cases, you will find that these stakeholders do not engage a professional water-proofer to undertake the most crucial part of any construction. In most of the projects, while the work for woodwork, metal fabrication, firefighting, water treatment, waste water treatment, and electrical, is awarded to specialized agencies, you will be surprised that waterproofing is kept in the scope of the civil contractor who does not have enough experience in handling this.
The specifications which are given in 90% of the tender documents are a cut-copy-paste job based on specifications that are more than 30 years old, and the rates given in the tender for this crucial work is sometimes less than the labor cost, as the contractors hire workers who do not know how to do waterproofing. So, all these things – the wrong specifications, low rates, and unskilled workers, result in a bad job of waterproofing and the subsequent failure to protect the building.
To a civil contractor, a project management consultant and an architect, it could be just a waterproofing job. But to a professional water-proofer, it’s a passion to perform. That’s why, most of the waterproofing companies have developed their own processes to study, evaluate and design waterproofing systems to create a building protection system, which not only performs and lasts, but also reduces the environmental impact on the property. The solutions would be more expensive than the services of a civil contractor, but the result would be long lasting, and therefore, cost-effective in the long term.
