Recently in Baku suddenly a newly-built 16-storey building was ruined.
It was almost complete and the construction was done by “Mutafakir” private organization. According to Azerbaijani media when the building was ruined there were workers inside the building and 7-8 people are still under the ruins. According to the constructors there were more people inside the building than what the official statement says. In the result of this breakdown the construction crane also fell down and smashed the cars parked in the parking lot. According to witnesses a group of children also remained under the ruins. These kids were playing in the playground of the building. The President of Azerbaijan ordered to establish a committee, which will be clarifying the reasons of the accidents and strictly punish the culprits. The incident in Baku makes us one more time ponder over the construction of new buildings in Yerevan because practically our buildings are not insure from such incidents either. The buildings that are being constructed in Yerevan satisfy neither the constructors nor the specialists. “RA climatic conditions don’t enable us to conduct non-stop construction in three shifts,” told us the specialists responsible for the sector. They also told us that the Russian experts, who arrived here, find it unacceptable that the heating system montage in the buildings is done in cold winter and stuffy summer weathers. Thus the work conducted cannot have quality. Besides that during the construction of the buildings in the North Avenue, the constructors have not followed the simplest rule of construction – the necessary distance among buildings. This means that during fire or accidents the nearby buildings are also going to suffer. These important security terms are ignored in Yerevan. During the construction of multi-floor buildings lots of cranes are working, which also change their position and location. In the event of strong winds these cranes may fall down on buildings. In accordance with the law on technical security the montage, conservation of cranes is subject to expertise. This function must be carried out by the national center of technical security. In the center they offer the journalists to ask all their questions to Vladimir Hovsepyan, who has submitted the position of the director of the center, General Ashot Petrosyan – the PR specialist. We were interested in how many cranes are working in the center of Yerevan, whether expertise is conducted for each of them. We were also interested how much the expertise costs, the fine for avoiding expertise, etc. When talking to us on the phone it turned out that it turned out that Vladimir Hovsepyan got offended from the 168-Zham newspaper for writing articles about them. Thus neither Hovsepyan nor his boss Petrosyan answered our questions. Of course these two people are not exception in Armenia as we lack in professional and responsible specialists. For example during the construction of Armenal factory the Russians preferred to invite Russian experts here by ignoring the comparably cheaper manpower of Armenians. The problem is not only that we don’t have a sufficient number of specialists but also the fact that most of them don’t even have international certification. In the event of having such a certification our country being a member of the WTO would be able to draw conclusions in the event of disasters worldwide. This would considerably raise the prestige of our country. Meanwhile we don’t have a certain authorized body. In terms of technical security we may state that the field is in an unfavorable condition. We’ll advert to this topic in near future.