A DIRTY ROTTEN SCANDAL
When Peter Dyer began investigating leaky buildings, he had a simple question: What the hell happened?
For decades, we’d built homes that didn’t let water in and didn’t rot. But despite this, and despite technology improving, from the mid-1980s we began constructing buildings that leaked – thousands of them – homes, apartments, schools, hospitals, retirement villages and prisons. All failed disastrously, causing massive damage and a host of health problems for those living and working in them.
Dyer, a retired engineer, just couldn’t understand how this had suddenly happened, so started looking for answers. That was 2011, and since then, he has become increasingly astonished, not just at the many deliberate acts that allowed the disaster to occur, but also the scale of the devastation it wrought.
His book on the subject, Rottenomics, highlights the causes, gives examples of the personal despair that resulted, and labels it “the largest man-made disaster in New Zealand’s history”.
“Like a toxic mould,” he writes, “this national tragedy has been nourished in a culture focused on short-term cost cutting, providing quick benefits for a
