![]() "So, if you put a one metre wide concrete slab around your house and you seal it up against the walls, you move the wet to dry boundary away from right under your walls," explained Professor Fityus. "But cutting them down can be problematic, because if the tree's established it already has a moisture regime happening and if you cut it down suddenly you've got more moisture in the soil than you did before," he added.Īnother option is to put paving all around the house. One option is to cut down all the trees on your property. "You can try to stop the soil from moving, and you can only do that from stopping it getting wet and dry," Professor Fityus said. However, in an established house, once you have got cracking, it is very hard to stop it. "You can build bigger foundations under the house at the start, but that's expensive," he said. ( ABC News)Įven in areas with reactive soils prone to expansion and contraction, Professor Fityus said there are ways to mitigate against cracking. Hallway cracks in a federation house in Sydney's inner-west, probably caused by dry soil. The building or engineers department of your local council may be able to provide information about the type of soil your house is built on, or you can check to see if it has a geotechnical investigation of your property done as part of a development permit submission. "They are living buildings - during summer they open, during winter they close." "The usual approach is not to correct them, not to fill them in and patch them because next year again they will reappear in a worse condition. "If buildings are in areas that are susceptible to shrink and swell, those cracks are non-structural and shouldn't affect the structural integrity of the building," said Professor Khalili. That is the attitude some experts say homeowners should take about the cracks in their walls. The ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi, where broken pottery is stuck back together with gold, celebrates the beauty of the cracks. "To that end, the standards we've set in the past need to change as well." What should you do if your house is cracking? We've got to be a lot more proactive in the way we understand how to manage our buildings in a newly defined era," he said. "We can't rely on that seasonal benefit anymore. ( Supplied: Sandra Williams)Īrchicentre Australia managing director Peter Giorgiev said building regulations need to adapt to the warming environment. Many Sydney homeowners have noticed new or worse cracks appearing just in the last month or so.Ī jagged crack winds its way along the external brickwork of this hundred-year-old house in north-west Sydney, January 2020. "This is an extreme event, and there's no surprise there's a correlation to soils around the country being drier than they've ever been before and the drought," said Professor Fityus. "Soils continue to be extremely dry along the east coast of New South Wales and the fraction of the state experiencing very much below average soil moisture in December has increased to 48 per cent compared to 25 per cent in November," the bureau said in its December drought report.Īs the soil beneath us dries up, plants and trees are trying to stay alive, desperately sucking up whatever moisture they can get from the ground, which is drying the soil even more. ![]() That heat and dryness is not confined to the atmosphere around us - soil moisture content in December was also "very much below average" in parts of every state and territory except the ACT, according to BOM data. The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has confirmed that last year was Australia's hottest and driest year on record, with varying parts of Australia having been in drought since 2017. "We've got this rare occasion now where we're going without rain, significant rainfall, for months or, in some places, 12 months and that means we have long periods where soil, which would otherwise not lose its moisture, is now losing its moisture," explained Stephen Fityus, a professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Newcastle. ![]() ![]() In the vast majority of cases, cracks in houses are caused when the soil underneath the house starts to dry and contract, causing the footing of the house to shift unevenly, which leads the walls to move and crack.Ĭlay soils are much more susceptible, or 'reactive', to changing moisture content than sandy soils because, like a sponge, they soak up or repel water. "In extraordinary dry times like now, those cracks will widen," warned Professor Nasser Khalili, the head of geotechnical engineering at the University of New South Wales. As a record-breaking drought continues to overwhelm large parts of Australia, more of these kinds of cracks are appearing in homes throughout the country.
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