Welcome to the second Lote Notes Newsletter for 2022. As we round the corner into the final quarter of this financial year, we hope that all of you have managed to stay safe with the wet weather, particularly in QLD and NSW, and the challenges of navigating the pandemic.

 

There are a number of topics we have nominated to cover in this edition of the newsletter including changes to the NSW EP&A Regulation and a discussion on the practical considerations of the NSW Design and Building Practitioners Act and Regulation from a fire safety perspective. The recent introduction of these legislative instruments and the accompanying regulation means that the industry is still finding its feet with regard to the implementation. Both of these articles discuss the implications to the practice of fire engineering with a view that our fellow practitioners will likewise share their experiences, so that industry wide best practices are established, and the impact on project timelines are understood. The consequential need for better coordination and communication within the project design team are matters that project managers can raise early in the project rather than at the last minute when everyone is trying to get their Design Compliance Declarations (DCD) submitted.

 

Our security team has pitched in with practical and security considerations surrounding the implementation of the D2.22 provision in the Building Code of Australia for fire isolated exits. While this is a provision that is applicable to every building with an effective height above 25m and to all Class 9a healthcare and Class 9c aged care buildings, there is a lot of confusion in the industry as to how this can be implemented and the security risks that need to be balanced against these provisions for re-entry into the building from fire isolated stairs during emergencies. This article explores these considerations and presents a range of risk mitigation strategies.

 

As part of our regular cybersecurity column, our focus this quarter is on ransomware. Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly frequent and sophisticated. Our article presents an overview of this cybersecurity risk and some strategies that organisations can employ to reduce their risk exposure and to recover from such an attack.

 

To round things off our wellness column includes an introduction to the concept of interthinking. In an age of all day back to back Zoom/Microsoft Teams/Google Meet calls, meetings have become major sources of anxiety and are often counterproductive. But this doesn’t have to be the case. If harnessed correctly, meetings can unlock group creativity, the building of ideas and the unlocking of innovation — however, for this to happen we must learn how to interthink.

 

We look forward to receiving your thoughts and feedback.

The BCA Deemed-to-Satisfy (DtS) Provisions stipulate that for Class 9a healthcare and 9c aged care buildings, and for all buildings above an effective height of 25m, the doors from fire-isolated exits must not be locked from the inside. This requirement to allow re-entry into the building from the fire isolated exit imposes considerable challenges with regard to security risks, where re-entry from fire isolated exits could allow anyone to enter any space within these buildings once they have entered the fire isolated exit.

 

On 1 January 2022 two new regulations were implemented to replace the existing NSW Environmental Planning and Assessment Regulation 2000 (EP&A Reg 2000) which has been utilised by the building industry for more than 20 years.

 

The proliferation of building defects and issues that owners and owners’ corporations had to deal with culminated in the Shergold Weir Building Confidence Report in 2018, and the subsequent response from the NSW Government led to the Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020. With the introduction of a statutory duty of care, the Design and Building Practitioners Act and Regulation, amongst its other objectives, aims to ensure that suitably qualified designers were signing off on the job.

 

Ransom is an old crime that has taken on a new form in ransomware. The Australian Cyber Security Centre defines ransomware as “a type of malicious software (malware)” that gets onto your device and makes it unusable (ACSC). How it works is not too far off the television and movie depiction of the concept of ransom. On an otherwise uneventful morning, you wake up to see that you have lost access to all your data.

A side effect of the pandemic was the mass migration of meetings to online exchanges and the era of back-to-back Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet calls. Meetings can be time consuming and, in many instances, unproductive and distracting from your core job function. But meetings can be where the magic happens, where creativity is sparked, ideas built upon and outcomes achieved. This is where this concept of interthinking can become a powerful tool for managers to employ.