The Formation, Development, and Future of CROSS

CROSS (Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures) captures safety concerns and events from submitted reports and shares lessons learned from them. The objective is to identify pre-cursors and help prevent future failures and loss of life. CROSS has a volunteer panel of expert engineers covering a wide spectrum of the design and construction sectors who comment on reports in a no-blame environment. These are published and examples will be given. Moreover, in 2017, a fire in Grenfell Tower in London resulted in 72 deaths. The UK Government commissioned an independent review of building regulations and fire safety: the Hackitt review. Included in the recommendations was a proposal that CROSS should be strengthened for structural safety and expanded to include fire safety. Results from this enhanced system will be available to all at no cost and the results will be used to inform the new UK Building Safety Regulator whose role is being formulated. Furthermore, as CROSS became established, there was interest from like-minded groups in other countries and currently there are schemes in the US (CROSS-US) and Australasia (CROSS-AUS) which will be covered in other papers of this session. Thus, the ultimate aim is to have a global network of CROSS communities who exchange reports and publish material that will help to keep users of buildings safer. This will be a resource for owners, design practitioners, builders, regulators, academics, and of course the public.