Israeli tech companies looking to prevent the next building collapse

• Author: ZEV STUB
• Published date: 07 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Last month, a residential building in Holon collapsed after 16 families were evacuated only a day earlier. That created a sense of panic that has led to the emergency evacuation of several other buildings, including one in Ra'anana that was demolished Monday evening in order to prevent its imminent collapse.

The Ra'anana building was already undergoing renovations to strengthen its foundations, but the digging around the building destabilized it and caused it to tip.

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The collapse this summer of a beachfront condominium in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Florida, also caused many to raise an alarm.

"This wave of evacuations is something very serious, and it will force municipalities, regulators, insurance companies, banks and tenants to change the way they work," Paz said. "Cities have been slow to approve urban renewal projects like pinui-binui and Tama 38 plans because they add to the burdens of urban planning, but now there will be pressure on them to work faster."

Bricks was founded in 2020 to encourage innovation in the proptech sector.

"We define proptech as innovation connected to any part of the real-estate industry, including construction, building management, even renewable energy when it is related to building," Paz clarified.

The real-estate industry is one of the last industries in the world to open up to new technology innovations, but, in the past two years or so, the Israeli proptech sector has been flourishing, with some 150-200 start-ups and counting, Paz said.

"As the risk of building collapses becomes more understood, we will see more companies stepping into this space," she added."

Paz listed a number of Israeli companies currently working to prevent future building collapses.

Dynamic Infrastructure is a company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze data from photos, along with other digital tools to maintain infrastructure installations such as bridges, dams and tunnels, and provide alerts about cracks and structural defects that could cause disasters.

"After the collapse in...