Elevation - who's responsible?

[Inspector Gadget]

Wanted to reach out to others on elevation.

Part 3 buildings generally require a design team. The responsibility to correctly place a building - meaning both setbacks from sidelines and the elevation - lies on the architect and, if retained, surveyor. That's a fairly simple answer, and for those of us who use letters of commitment, we can easily outline in the letters of commitment the responsibility to set/verify elevation as one of the key requirements for the design professional.

Our province does not require design professionals for part 9 buildings. Which leads to an interesting question: whose responsibility is it to determine/verify if the elevation of a building is correct? What happens (as an example) if someone builds a little office building, and the drawings show a 6" elevation compared to a municipal sidewalk, with a 6' ramp, but someone bungles the footing/frostwall, and now there's a 9" elevation, leading to potential ramp/access issues.

 

[Plumb-bob]

Legally, the final responsibility always falls to the owner. Even if the owner signs an agreement so that another party can act as their agent, the owner is holding the bag at the end of the day. Who ends up being financially responsible may depend on contracts or legal decisions.

In a situation such as above, if an elevation was missed leading to an accessibility problem, the responsibility is with the owner, and they can figure out who on the team made the mistake and how it will be fixed.

 

[NLaf]

There are 2 parts to this. Some one is responsible for the permit drawings and someone is responsible for the construction. So it depends where the fault is. If the drawings didn't have proper elevations or didn't properly convey that information and requirements then it falls to the person taking responsibility for the permit drawings. Could be the owner or a designer in this case. Things like this happens a lot with cheap homeowners that don't understand the value of good quality plans and just want the cheapest "permit" possible. So it falls to them to pass along the missing information to the builder. Now if the drawings had all the proper information, had proper sidewalk elevation point, provided underside of footing, top of wall and top of floor elevation for the contractor then it would 100% fall on the fault of the contractor.

 

[tmurray]

The short answer is that it is not your responsibility.

Some jurisdictions require a surveyor to set building elevations (Moncton does this even for houses). The contractor either has to fix it on site or the designer can look at alternatives.

Your job to identify deficiencies. The owner's job is to correct deficiencies. The court's job is to assign financial responsibility for deficiencies.