Bureaucracy gone mad

We recently (February 24th) had a storm sweep across the city - heavy rain, local flash flooding, (very) high winds in some areas.

A property that I own had the rear patio roof removed by the wind, lifted OVER the house, and wrapped around the power pole outside the front boundary.

Naturally the power to the neighbourhood didn't survive the impact, and houses in several streets around were without power for a number of days. This was largely due to the inability of the power reticulation company to rapidly resolve the large number of outages caused by the storm rather than the extent of the damage to infrastructure in this individual case.


I have contacted the company that provides my insurance, and have been advised that certain local governments (thankfully NOT the one that I have to deal with in this case) require that a BUILDING PERMIT be obtained before repairs can be started.

THIS IS INSANE!

I have a lawfully constructed building, meeting all applicable building codes, and if the house was one street south I would have to PAY AND WAIT for a building permit before I could make good storm damage? Which MORON wrote THAT into the local government by-laws?

The last time I had to apply for a building permit (on another project) it took 12 WEEKS and $600 to get the piece of paper saying that construction could commence. There is no way that I would contemplate waiting that long if I had a building with only half a roof due to storm damage.

Sometimes I think we should treat local government politicians like the Golgafrincham hair-dressers and phone sanitisers.