“Building Safety: Where You Live, Work and Play”
When you enter a house or building, you may not be thinking about whether it is properly constructed and safe. Fortunately, the safety experts at the Palm Beach County Building Division think about building safety and fire prevention every day. To help raise awareness of building safety, the Building Division is observing Building Safety Week, May 5-11. The theme is Building Safety: Where You Live, Work and Play.
“The important work we do is often overlooked until a catastrophic tragedy occurs,” said Palm Beach County Building Official Rebecca Caldwell. “When building safety and fire prevention experts inspect buildings during and after construction, it helps to ensure that the places where you live, learn, work and play are safe.”
Building safety and fire prevention codes address all aspects of construc-tion, such as structural soundness of buildings, reliability of fire prevention and suppression systems, plumbing and mechanical systems, and energy efficiency and sustainability. To ensure a building is safe requires the active participation of building safety and fire prevention officials, architects, contractors, engineers and others in the construction industry, as well as property owners.
“Public safety is our number one concern,” said Caldwell. “During Building Safety Week and all year long, building safety and fire prevention officials are here to help protect you and your community.”
Did you know that incomplete permitted work could prevent the sale of your house from closing? Do you know what projects require a permit and which ones do not? And why you should always hire licensed contractors to perform work on your home? What do building green and living green really mean? What are some ways to “harden” your older home for the next storm?
To provide answers to these and other questions, the Palm Beach County Building Division will be joined by the Contractor Certification Division and Palm Beach County Fire-Rescue during an open house on May 8 from 9 a.m. to noon. Come and meet your Palm Beach County code officials at our Vista Center complex, 2300 N. Jog Road in West Palm Beach. Refreshments will be provided.
There will be lots of good information via videos and brochures about pool safety, mold prevention, green building, and preparing for natural disasters, among other subjects. There will be coloring sheets and stickers for the kids, and we encourage everyone to stop by to learn about the essential safety work of the Palm Beach County Building Division and other code officials.
Building Safety Week began in 1980 and is sponsored by the International Code Council. The ICC develops the codes that form the basis of the Florida Building Code, and are most widely used to construct residential and commercial buildings, including homes and schools.
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