Greek buildings are well constructed as a rule. This is more than evident in how they stand up to the stress of frequent seismic activity. The market for apartment buildings and small private construction projects, however, does not always operate under the best conditions and this can cause serious lapses, as the recent collapse of a four-story building in the downtown Athens district of Kato Petralona has shown.
According to professionals with decades of experience in the construction industry, pressure from property owners to keep costs down, inadequate supervision of construction work, the lack of insurance coverage for small-scale projects, the absence of a registry establishing qualification requirements for contractors and shortages of experienced, skilled labor, are among the sector’s biggest problems.
The collapse of the building at 22 Alkminis Street is the main topic of conversation among civil engineers, architects and builders right now. “We can’t know what happened in this specific case, but generally speaking, there is a massive discrepancy between smaller projects, like the construction of an apartment building, and bigger ones like, say, an office building,” the vice chairman of construction services firm Ballian Techniki SA, Loukianos Tiktopoulos, tells Kathimerini.
