CROSS International

CROSS - Confidential Reporting on Structural Safety – has been operated since 2005 by the UK Structural-Safety group to help engineers learn from the experiences of others to avoid structural failures. Reports are submitted confidentially by practitioners and comments are added from a panel of industry experts. Anonymised reports with comments are added to a data base and published in Newsletters which are widely circulated and read by designers and contractors. Whilst the system is primarily for the UK there have been expressions of interest in expanding it to other countries from organisations in Europe, Australia, the USA and South Africa. The aim is to set up an International arrangement whereby countries with equivalent confidential reporting schemes would add reports to a central data base. Experience on preventing failures and structural collapses, some with catastrophic consequences, would be freely shared amongst both developed and developing countries in a confidential, independent, and expert way. The paper will present proposals for how this can be achieved and the benefits that would be obtained.