I don’t know about you, but I find it scary that pieces of our buildings are falling down. And, no nefarious forces are at work. The Toronto weather is being blamed. It is no comfort at all to know that the sign on the CIBC building passed the City of Toronto building standards when it was installed in 2002. In spite of the fact that the acrylic plastic sign received a passing grade, a 2-foot part of it fell 58 stories to the ground. The truly astonishing thing in all of this is that no one was injured. It seems that the worst effect was the gross inconvenience of having 3 major intersections and 2 stretches of road closed by the police for 12 hours while emergency technicians made sure the rest of the sign was secure.

Tests are now being conducted on the structural stability of the signs to determine whether or not they are safe. Why wasn’t this done prior to their installation? Everyone seems willing to blame this near disaster on the Toronto weather conditions. The extremely high winds were clocked as high as 107 kilometres per hour at Pearson International Airport. They could have been even stronger at the top of a tall building downtown. What no one is talking about is the degree of force that the building code allows for. And how many signs are there on other buildings that could be affected in similar conditions? We seem to be in a rush to reach the sky. But are we paying enough attention to safety issues when we build these skyscrapers?