“One of the key challenges in the engineering is lack of a local reference code or regulations. Different engineers in the field has studied from very different countries and they refer the codes of the respective country. It means the designs done in the Maldives are being followed to various codes of the world. That’s a serious issue.

Quite a lot of people ask a very simple question. How strong is soil beneath Male? That question leads several engineering questions. There are very limited number of soil investigations done to check Male soil conditions. For 10 storey buildings, there is no requirements of investigating ground before construction, just a visual soil inspection is sufficient for current regulation.
As we see, when a 10-storey building construction completed, adjacent buildings get some form of cracks. Such cracks may be due to sinking of the newly built building. I have seen about 2 to 3 inches of sinking of buildings in Male during construction. That may be a lot of sinking I would say in a controlled environment. My suggestion would be to control such sinking to a limit of 1 inch as a maximum. A design can be done to achieve such goals.
When we talk to owners regarding such soil improvements, they do not show much interest saying that will increase cost of their investment.
A more serious challenge is keeping the engineers in the civil engineering field. A lot of civil engineers already stopped practicing the field due to small salary. I am sure, a solution to this problem would exist.”

View the full interview on build.mv.