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One point I'd make from an earlier thread on the topic -- it sounds like RAAC panels were used in a number of countries. It may be that the UK is particularly affected due to having quite a bit of rain -- it's moisture that does the damage.
But it may also be that the UK is being relatively-proactive. Almost all the articles I see talking about this are in the UK. I wasn't able to find articles elsewhere saying "yeah, we looked into this, but it's not an issue in our country because X".
We don't use it much in the US, but it looks like there is at least some out there, and I haven't seen articles here saying "yeah, this is what the Brits are worried about, and we identified the buildings where it was present here and have determined that it's not a problem".
And use of the stuff is apparently common in mainland Europe, and I see no (English-language) news articles on it there.
So it may well be that the British response -- whether it should have been faster or not -- is, in fact, the response that's actually moving the most-quickly.
@tal @0x815 Or perhaps in some places when they build something in 1990 with a predicted lifetime of 30 years, say, they simultaneously write in the 2018 diary" get bids to replace X starting in next 2 years"?
Heh. Well, even if one takes a really hard-cynical position like that, it'd probably be preferable to have it fixed than ignored. I'm saying that the UK isn't unique in using it, but is unusual in the attention being paid to it.
My understanding is that the reduced 30 year lifetime was something determined in the 1990s after the material had already been used in construction for some decades, that the short estimate was based on the rate of degradation observed. That is, the basic problem wasn't people intentionally choosing a material that they knew to have a short lifetime, but in a new, experimental material having some serious issues that weren't originally recognized when it started being used.