The building survived the flood. But did the structure?

Interview with Mariana Garștea, General Manager, Sixense România  

Mariana Garștea, General Manager of Sixense Romania, the only company in Romania with an ISC-authorised laboratory dedicated exclusively to structural and geotechnical monitoring (ISC authorisation no. 4036/2023) and part of the global Sixense Group, explains what owners’ associations and facility managers are actually required to do, and why the gap between legal obligation and common practice remains so wide. 

Several newly built apartment buildings have flooded in recent months in Bucharest. When that happens, what should an owners’ association or facility manager actually do to check whether the structure itself was affected, not just the visible water damage? 

The summer of 2026 gave Bucharest a very direct reminder of something the industry has known for a long time: water is among the most damaging forces a building will encounter across its operational life. The storms of late June and early July flooded basements, underground car parks, and common areas across the city. What residents and associations saw was the visible damage. What they may not have seen is what water does to a structure over time, and that is, I believe, the more important question. 

When significant water ingress occurs, the first instinct is to pump out the water, dry the space, and repaint. That response addresses the symptom. The structure underneath is a different matter entirely. 

What an owners’ association or facility manager should do, before any repair work begins, is document everything. Photographs, timestamps, water levels reached, areas affected. This documentation is not just useful for insurance claims. It is the starting point for any technical assessment that follows. 

The next step is to bring in a specialist for a structural inspection. Not a general contractor, not a painter. In Romanian practice, that means an ISC-authorised laboratory working on the relevant profile and, where structural damage is suspected, a technical expert certified by MDLPA. Water that has reached the foundation zone, the structural walls, or the reinforced concrete elements of a building can cause damage that is not visible to the untrained eye for months or even years. Specifically, prolonged contact between water and reinforced concrete accelerates the corrosion of the steel reinforcement inside. Once that process begins, it does not stop when the water is gone. 

Concretely, a responsible assessment after a flooding event should cover: 

• The condition of structural elements in the affected areas 

• Any signs of settlement or differential movement 

• The state of waterproofing systems 

• Whether the drainage infrastructure performed as designed or failed 

For newer residential complexes, this assessment should also be cross-referenced against the monitoring data from the construction phase, which should sit in Chapter D of the building’s Technical Book together with the events log, if it exists and was properly transferred to the association. If it does not exist or was never transferred, that is a separate problem worth addressing at the same time. In either case, the flooding event itself has tobe recorded in the events log. That entry is what demonstrates, years later, that the association knew and acted. 

There is one further step that is almost always missed. Under P130/2025, an event capable of affecting a structure is precisely the trigger for moving from current monitoring to special monitoring (what is called „urmărirespecială”). This is neither optional nor a formality. It means an instrumented programme, drawn up by the designer or by a technical expert, with defined measurement points, thresholds and reporting obligations, and with any investigations performed by laboratories authorised by ISC on the corresponding profile. A flood that reaches the foundation zone of a residential building is exactly the situation the normative was written for. 

The principle is simple: what is not measured cannot be managed. Water damage that goes unassessed structurally is not resolved. It is only deferred. 

If an association or facility manager decides to ignore this and simply repaint, replaster and move on, what are the actual risks they are taking on, both technically and legally? 

Repainting over water damage is one of the most common and most costly decisions an association or facility manager can make. It feels like a solution, but it is not. 

Technically, the risks accumulate silently. Moisture trapped behind fresh plaster accelerates material degradation. Steel reinforcement that has begun to corrode continues to do so. Settlement processes triggered by water-weakened ground do not reverse themselves. A building that looks repaired continues to deteriorate at the structural level, and when the problems become visible again, they are significantly worse and significantly more expensive to address than they would have been at the point of the original event. 

The legal exposure is substantial and often underestimated. Romanian law is clear on this. Law 10/1995 establishes the obligation to ensure the structural integrity of buildings throughout their service life. Normative P130/2025 specifies what monitoring of structural behaviour over time must look like in practice, including the obligation to move to special monitoring after an event that may affect a structure. Law 196/2018 on owners’ associations places direct legal responsibility for the structural health of the building on the association, through its president and administrator. 

This means that if an association or facility manager is aware that a flooding event occurred, and chooses to address only the cosmetic damage without commissioning a structural assessment, they are not simply making a maintenance decision. In my reading, they are also assuming legal liability for whatever follows. In the event of a subsequent incident, the question any insurer will ask is: what did you do after the flooding to verify the structure was unaffected? Repainting is not an answer that provides legal protection. 

There is also a financial dimension that is often overlooked. A building with undocumented water damage and no structural assessment has a problem that will surface at the worst possible moment: during a sale, during a refinancing, during an insurance claim, or during a technical inspection triggered by a complaint. At that point, the cost of resolution is no longer the cost of a proper assessment after the flood. It is the cost of that assessment, plus the cost of whatever damage has progressed in the interim, plus potential legal costs. 

Romanian law already requires structural monitoring throughout a building’s life, not just during construction. Why is this still treated as optional by so many owners’ associations, and what should change in how they think about their responsibility here? 

The law is not optional. What is optional, in practice, is the enforcement of it, and that gap is where most of the problem lives. 

The three texts I mentioned earlier fit together without gaps. Normative P130/2025 is now the most specific and demanding framework Romania has ever had for how monitoring construction sites and buildings in operation must be carried out. The legal architecture is in place. The practice is not. 

There are several reasons for this, and none of them are acceptable as long-term excuses. 

The first is a knowledge gap. Many association boards and facility managers genuinely do not know that structural monitoring is a legal obligation. They know they must maintain lifts, manage heating systems, collect fees. Structural monitoring is rarely explained to them at the point of handover, and the Technical Book, whose Chapter D should contain the monitoring programme for the operational phase, is either missing, incomplete, or handed over without explanation. 

The second is a perception problem. Monitoring is seen as a cost with no visible return. The building looks fine, nothing has collapsed, so why spend money on measurement? This logic works until it does not, and when it stops working, it stops very visibly and very expensively. 

What needs to change is the framing. Structural monitoring is not a technical luxury or a line item to be debated at the annual general meeting. It is the instrument through which an association discharges its legal duty of care toward the people who live in the building. An owners’ association that does not have an active monitoring programme is not just skipping an administrative task. It is operating in legal exposure, and the residents it represents are living in a building whose structural condition is unknown. 

After the events of this summer, I believe there is no credible argument left for deferring this. The structural integrity of residential buildings has been tested by conditions that will recur. Associations and facility managers who treat that as a reason to act will be in a fundamentally different position, legally and technically, than those who treat it as an inconvenience to be painted over. 

In practice, none of this starts with equipment. It starts with two questions any association can put on the agenda this month: does our Technical Book have a Chapter D, and has anyone written down what happened in June and July? If the answer to either is no, that is where the work begins.