The Great Tower Block Fire Tragedy of London

[peterms]

12 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

For me that isn't important what's more important is people's safety and this horror does not happen again

Well we agree on that.  My point is that something obvious and visible may not them safer.  Though they may feel ssfer.

[omariqy]

I think the bigger point is that people watched their friends and family burn to death in front of them and they could do nothing. We still don't know 100% why it happened but we have a pretty good idea. One reason may be the cladding. I'm sorry it may be panicking but if I was in the same boat and knew people had to endure that in a similar situation to me then I would do what I can to make sure it doesnt happen again and take whatever steps are needed. However drastic.

[omariqy]

I just watched a BBC clip and to be honest it seems to be chaos. A few people have said there was a fire a few years ago and it was contained. However not sure when the cladding was put up. Apparently they have a choice to evacuate or stay if they want.

[MakemineVanilla]

The evacuation seems totally over the top but probably predictable considering the political pressure which has been created.

Knowing that an example will need to be made of someone, you can't blame the potential candidates for believing in Sod's law.

[peterms]

11 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

To take the alternative view on Camden's plan...can you imagine the reaction if one person in one block was to die in a vaguely relatable incident when a council knew there was a risk and had a week or two to do something about it.

I wouldn't want to be that spokes fall guy: 'yeah we'd watched the news but didn't want to over react to 79 deaths'.

Yes, I agree.  The question is what could be done to make the building safe enough to stay in until the cladding is removed.  And it makes sense to give the option of moving out.  But have these buildings, designed to be fireproof, really become such tinderboxes that the measures I suggested, and others, can't make them safe enough to stay in for a few days, even with putting people on a 24 hour fire watch?  If the fire experts say so, then fair enough.  I'm not clear that they have, but I may have missed it.

I'm not suggesting doing nothing, I'm asking if the situation is so out of control that there is no option but to evacuate.  The question is, what is the risk and what can be done.  If risks have been created or allowed to develop to the point where they are literally out of control,  there are many more questions to answer than the Grenfell inquiry will cover.

[Demitri_C]

1 hour ago, MakemineVanilla said:

The evacuation seems totally over the top but probably predictable considering the political pressure which has been created.

Knowing that an example will need to be made of someone, you can't blame the potential candidates for believing in Sod's law.

Not being funny but if that was me I would be delighted they are ensuring my safety. So I have to sleep rough a couple nights or stay with family? As long as I'm safe if a fire occurs a repeat of this wouldn't happen. Well done Camden council.

[bickster]

It's not just the cladding in these blocks so the radio was saying earlier.

Apparently, there were problems with fire doors and gas pipes, so this may have heightened the risks, hence the hasty evacuation

EDIT:

Quote

More than 700 flats in tower blocks on an estate in the Swiss Cottage area of north-west London have been evacuated because of fire safety concerns.

Camden Council said people in four towers on the Chalcots estate were moved for "urgent fire safety works".

The council added it was booking hotels but around 100 residents have spent the night on air beds in a leisure centre.

The estate's cladding is similar to Grenfell Tower in west London, where a fire is feared to have killed 79.

Chalcots was refurbished between 2006 and 2009 by the same firm, Rydon, that oversaw work at Grenfell Tower in 2015-16.

Camden Council said it will remove external thermal cladding from five tower blocks on the Chalcots estate.

It also said there were concerns about the insulation of gas pipes going into flats, and fire doors.

The council initially announced the evacuation of one tower block, Taplow, but later extended the move to all five tower blocks it had checked.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, the council then announced that one of the five - Blashford - did not need to be evacuated, and residents could return.

Blashford is smaller and has "several different design elements".

1

Clicky for the BEEB

[chrisp65]

I was listening to something on the radio, didn't catch the start of it. But they were looking at other similar blocks and the reaction of the fire inspectors was essentially '**** me I can't believe what I'm seeing'.

They were outside on a balcony next to the (now known to be) flammable insulation and could see in where gas pipes were passing through what had been fire barrier but had been replaced with thin plywood. There was an obvious element of drama and urgency being created. But again, how does a council then say, well there's no real rush here. it took over 20 minutes for Grenfell to start killing people.

 

[bickster]

27 Blocks around the country now discovered with similar cladding

Also heard on the radio yesterday that Premier Inn were checking all their buildings as they believed they may have a very similar issue

[snowychap]

9 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

They were outside on a balcony next to the (now known to be) flammable insulation and could see in where gas pipes were passing through what had been fire barrier but had been replaced with thin plywood.

Who was monitoring these works? Who signed off on them? Do they get inspected?

[chrisp65]

Just now, snowychap said:

Who was monitoring these works? Who signed off on them? Do they get inspected?

I know nothing about these works and thankfully, I've never been involved in domestic residential high rise.

But in vaguely related works for vaguely similar clients, it's the inspection regime where money can be saved.

Yes, somebody somewhere will have had the job of inspecting. I would suspect a scenario whereby in the 'good old days' a senior inspector would have taken as long as it takes to inspect properly and send in a substantial invoice. More recently, they will have been told £90 per hour and taking a month is too much. The revised rate is now £65 per hour and you've got a week. So the job can't afford a senior inspector. So they have the junior inspector. With less time to inspect.

When that happened to the company I was then working for, they had the good sense to say. 'thanks, but no thanks'. 

 

[snowychap]

1 hour ago, chrisp65 said:

I know nothing about these works and thankfully, I've never been involved in domestic residential high rise.

But in vaguely related works for vaguely similar clients, it's the inspection regime where money can be saved.

Yes, somebody somewhere will have had the job of inspecting. I would suspect a scenario whereby in the 'good old days' a senior inspector would have taken as long as it takes to inspect properly and send in a substantial invoice. More recently, they will have been told £90 per hour and taking a month is too much. The revised rate is now £65 per hour and you've got a week. So the job can't afford a senior inspector. So they have the junior inspector. With less time to inspect.

When that happened to the company I was then working for, they had the good sense to say. 'thanks, but no thanks'.

Sorry, they were meant to be 'open' questions rather than ones directed specifically at you.

Thanks for the reply, though.

I guess the process and regime is different for different types of buildings (and different works carried out) but the only thing I have to go on is the way in which the external insulation work was done to our homes here and how the contractors and HA handled it (obviously merely anecdote and in no way put forward as representative of standard practice).

It was chaotic: everyone passed responsiblity on to everyone else (the HA on to the main contractor, the main contractor on to the sub-contractors and so on); one subcontractor did one lot of work and another ripped it all out to finish their bit of work and then had to put it all back (poorly) and come back and supposedly made it good (nowhere near the quality of the original subcontractor's work); the main subcontractor demanded residents sign a waiver that they weren't responsible for any damage they caused before starting work, and at the end, there appears to have been little official inspection of the work.

When it comes down to it, the HA seem less than interested in the concerns of tenants. Unfortunately, that appears to be a common theme.

Still, it is miles better than the utter death trap private sector de facto HMO I lived in beforehand.

 

Edit: That assumes that they guy who died in a fire three doors down was not as a result of the new PVC door unit that was put in and it being virtually impossible to break down.

Edited June 24, 2017 by snowychap

[jon_c]

I've never understood the fire regulations, they can be insanely strict in some instances and completely lacking in others. 

I've known an inspector make someone move a door two centimeters away from the top of a staircase. Yet if it's a listed building that circumvents any fire regulations completely. It's bonkers.

[MakemineVanilla]

1 hour ago, chrisp65 said:

I know nothing about these works and thankfully, I've never been involved in domestic residential high rise.

But in vaguely related works for vaguely similar clients, it's the inspection regime where money can be saved.

Yes, somebody somewhere will have had the job of inspecting. I would suspect a scenario whereby in the 'good old days' a senior inspector would have taken as long as it takes to inspect properly and send in a substantial invoice. More recently, they will have been told £90 per hour and taking a month is too much. The revised rate is now £65 per hour and you've got a week. So the job can't afford a senior inspector. So they have the junior inspector. With less time to inspect.

When that happened to the company I was then working for, they had the good sense to say. 'thanks, but no thanks'. 

 

It does make you wonder whether if the UK had the same possibility for class-actions as in America, companies would find themselves incentivised to make proper inspections.

Corporate manslaughter laws rely on proving someone knew they were breaking the law, which is quite a hurdle.

Certainly companies sending out dodgy fridges, or failing to carry out inspections properly, might think that the prospect of a billion pound class action would concentrate their minds wonderfully.

[bickster]

Not much point in a class action when you've burnt to death

[peterms]

 

[HanoiVillan]

How are they still not getting that this isn't how to treat these people?

How are they still not getting that this is a PR disaster?

[magnkarl]

5 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

How are they still not getting that this isn't how to treat these people?

How are they still not getting that this is a PR disaster?

Yeah, not talking to people when they are in this mess is unbelievable. At least Camden, Bournemouth and other councils who have had to do something about their blocks are trying. Kensington and Chelsea seem to be floundering all over the place with every single thing they are doing. 

[peterms]

High rise, low quality: how we ended up with deathtraps like Grenfell

Quote

A vast number of UK housing tower blocks arose from often ignoble motives and shaky logic, writes LSE professor Patrick Dunleavy

Between 1945 and 1975, the UK built 440,000 high-rise flats for public housing tenants, at an extra cost per flat of around 40 per cent, as the core high-density estates. Grenfell Tower was completed in 1974 at the very end of a sustained mass housing boom which cleared tens of thousands of terraced houses in streets across every major city, and replaced them with a new landscape, often alien to the people who were compulsorily rehoused there.

Five main factors produced a heavy overuse of high rise. First, a Conservative government in 1956 was anxious to protect its suburban councils from demands for overspill council housing by encouraging Labour inner cities to speed up slum clearance and rehousing in situ. They introduced a progressive storey height subsidy, which increased for every extra storey in the height of a flat block. At 24 floors, Grenfell Tower represented a sustained attempt to ‘milk’ the subsidy.

Second, the largest UK construction firms heavily backed high rise as a protected market where small builders could not compete. The Whitehall department (MHLG) was anxious to foster industrial concentration into fewer firms as a way of speeding up lagging housing production. In the early and mid 1960s a huge promotional effort was also put into promoting ‘industrialised’ building, for which high-rise blocks were the most suitable form.

Third, architects and planners were heavily influenced by Corbusian dreams of ‘towers in a park’. Council architects were desperate to demonstrate their proficiency at something more glamorous than terraced housing. And planners were intoxicated by replacing ‘overcrowded’, mixed-use streets with segregated uses and a coarse-grained, ordered bureaucratic landscape.

A fourth key influence was that slum clearance processes themselves created enormous housing stress. They typically took thousands of ‘bedspace years’ out of circulation through blight and demolitions enacted years before replacement housing was completed. For inner urban councils this created intense pressures to cram the maximum numbers of people into the very next redevelopment. For many years, ministers, councillors and planners also reiterated the myth that high rise was essential for densification – but in fact the net gains made were small.

Source: John Lord

Glasgow’s Red Road Flats

The fifth and final condition creating high-rise mass housing was the powerlessness of council tenants and ‘slum area’ residents to resist. People might wait for 10 to 15 years in a blighted neighbourhood, or working their way up a long council waiting list, before being made an offer of rehousing in the next block or estate to be finished. They typically got one offer, and if they refused would be threatened with going to the bottom of the waiting list.

This power asymmetry also explains why the safety standards of high rises were progressively degraded. In the 1950s most ‘slab’ blocks had two staircases at each end, used brick external walls, and were weatherproof. And families with children were housed in low rise. By the mid-1960s industrialised high-rise boom, many different untried construction methods were used to slam up blocks around a single tower crane, with one staircase, poor weatherproofing, ill-fitting internal doors, high heating costs and tiny lifts that could not take furniture or even coffins. Children were increasingly marooned in higher storey flats.

The high-rise boom collapsed over 10 years from 1967 when the progressive storey height subsidy became too expensive to maintain. It was cut back by Whitehall (producing a short-lived boom in medium-rise flats instead). Industrialised high rise was discredited in 1968 when a progressive collapse killed six people at Ronan Point in Newham, following a small gas explosion. Schemes still in process continued for another few years. Governments of both parties in the late 1970s and 80s pledged to remove children from high rise, but this proved evanescent, as social housing cutbacks deepened.

In the last two decades many of the worst high-rise public housing developments – such as Glasgow’s 31-storey Red Road flats – have been blown up or otherwise demolished. But ‘mass housing’ has continued to evolve in the remainder, with chronic weather penetration issues, minimal maintenance on the cheap, and a recramming of families and highly dependent or newly arrived people into the worst blocks.

Just as in the 1960s and 70s the Grenfell Tower disaster has also already exposed appalling lapses of fire safety regulations, with new cladding materials and systems used as quick fixes for the high energy costs and poor external appearance of the tower blocks. New technologies have been widely applied by architects and engineers apparently blind to their limits and vulnerabilities, with perhaps 600 out of 4,000 tower blocks having the same cladding as Grenfell Tower. Cost-minimising social government departments and social-housing providers again ignored safety experts’ warnings and tenants’ views to screw down refurbishment costs so as to fit within austerity budgets. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

 

[peterms]

Hmmm.

It still sounds a bit like a politically driven panic reaction rather than a sober assessment of risk.

Quote

The communities secretary, Sajid Javid, announced on Monday that samples of aluminium panels from all 75 buildings that had been sent for fire retardancy testing had so far “failed”.

But he did not reveal what testing was undertaken apart from to say they determine whether the materials meet “the requirement for limited combustibility in building regulations”...

...Experts have warned that far more comprehensive tests on the entire cladding system are needed to establish if buildings are as at-risk as Grenfell was, including the insulation and design details such as fire stops...

...Barry Turner, director of technical policy at Local Authority Building Control, which represents council building control officers also asked: “I would like to know just what tests these panels are failing.”

“For any material to undergo a fire test as laid down in BS476 [which grades fire resistance] or one of the EU equivalent standards, you need a specific panel size, it needs to be mounted in a specific way,” he said. “There are fire tests done on individual products, but you need to test them combined [including insulation, cavity and fire stops] to see if they meet performance criteria for the job as a whole. That is how these systems are assessed for compliance with the building regulations.”