An Introduction to Liability for Exterior Structural Failure

Last week in Montreal a 40-year-old man was in hospital after bricks from a three-storey building collapsed on him while he was walking on the sidewalk. A few hundred bricks came loose from the top of the downtown building and fell on him injuring him severely.

In Toronto there are at least two class actions currently filed in relation to broken glass balcony railings in major condominium buildings and the plaintiffs are seeking $20 million dollars in each action as a result of loss of use of their balconies.

Toronto’s 75 storey First Canadian Place, the tallest office skyscraper in Canada, has undergone a massive $100 million dollar retro-fit primarily to address replacement of its marble cladding due to falling marble façade panels in 2007.

Earlier this year in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, inspections of a municipal building found deficiencies that “may cause the brick veneer on the outside of the building to fall as a whole, endangering anyone or anything below”.

Other recent exterior structural failures have occurred in the United States (Chicago and Baltimore) and Hong Kong.

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