The Great Tower Block Fire Tragedy of London

[Villarocker]

This is such a very sad and tragic incident. You can't call it an accident as the residents had expressed their fears of a disaster with loss of life and this obviously could have been avoided if the landlords had listened to those who lived in the block. My heart goes out to all those involved and who have been affected by this. 

Did anyone see the guy's eye witness account of seeing the fire brigade on site around 1:10am but they didn't use any water on the building until 3am? I find that incredible and, if true, will lead to a major investigation surely. 

[dubbs]

Surely they would be inside fighting the fire and trying to get people out as a priority?

[PaulC]

21 minutes ago, villarocker said:

This is such a very sad and tragic incident. You can't call it an accident as the residents had expressed their fears of a disaster with loss of life and this obviously could have been avoided if the landlords had listened to those who lived in the block. My heart goes out to all those involved and who have been affected by this. 

Did anyone see the guy's eye witness account of seeing the fire brigade on site around 1:10am but they didn't use any water on the building until 3am? I find that incredible and, if true, will lead to a major investigation surely. 

More likely the owners responsibility than the landlords I think. 

[LondonLax]

It seems a lot of money was spent recently on cladding building to improve its insulation but the material used is very flammable and has vents to prevent damp. 

It seems like a case of retrofitting a solution to one problem and creating a much bigger problem as a result. 

[peterms]

Well, there needs to be a full and open public inquiry, but some initial thoughts.

The design of tower blocks is specifically based around fire prevention.  So you have electric not gas (after the Ronan Point explosion), concrete frame, concrete staircases, fire stopping (physical blocks to prevent fire spreading) between levels.

The "stay put" fire advice is based on this.  That is a reasonable position.

Something changed, to make this block burn like that.

The two main lines of inquiry, from what we hear so far, are first the cladding and second the fire stopping.

The cladding burned.  We can see that from the videos.  Presumably it passed relevant standards (are they good enough?).  It is said it had some fireproofing on the outside layer only, but that lots of cladding is made of combustible material.  Sounds plausible, since the aim in fitting it is to improve energy conservation. 

Was it designed correctly?  It was fitted with a gap between it and the wall,  we hear, presumably to allow rain to dry away.  Was there meant to be separation between layers to prevent fire spreading?  Was it fitted properly?  Was it inspected?  Many of the problems with tower blocks are down to poor inspection and people skimping on the job,  famously not inserting enough bolts to hold the panels in place because, hey, I'm tired, it's hard to reach, and no-one's looking.

The second thing that has surfaced is fire stopping.  It is suggested that the existing fire stopping between levels was partially removed as part of the refurb, to make it possible to fit the new pipes required.  There is apparently a planning application to that effect.  Of course partial fire stopping is a bit like partial pregancy.  You either have it or you don't. The refurb was finished.  Was the fire stopping properly reinstated?

So to put these two things together, the nightmare scenario is removal of internal fire stopping, creating an internal chimney; and poorly designed or installed external cladding, creating an external chimney clad in combustible material.

It still needs a cause.  That seems to have been a fridge exploding (perhaps an exaggeration, but catching fire.  My dishwasher caught fire once,  it was a bit scary).  The electric supply in that block has already been shown to be unsafe with dangerous surges, and poor people buy cheap appliances which I assume are more likely to have safety issues than top of the range stuff.

The building passed building regs when it was built.  Standards have changed since then.  Sprinkler systems would not have been fitted then, but are more likely to be now.  Retrofitting them is messy, difficult, costly, so people don't do it.

There seems to be a number of issues about government standards (let's deregulate, remove all this red tape, allow contractors to say whether they have fitted something safely, no need for little Hitlers checking up on them), local authority performance (the tenants' association is scathing about this), the contractors, and even things like failure to remove cars that were blocking fire access.

It would be good to get beyond the immediate need to support the people concerned in this dreadful time,  and do some serious thinking about causes,  effects, and how we want to manage housing.

[maqroll]

Stunning pictures. Really awful tragedy. London is being tested lately.

[Genie]

8 hours ago, PaulC said:

More likely the owners responsibility than the landlords I think. 

I think so too, but then if you'd just spent £9m on a refurbishment and have all the certificates to say it meets all fire and structural standards its an easy one for him/her to ignore.

This seems to prove that the standards and regulations are wrong.

[itdoesntmatterwhatthissay]

15 hours ago, villa4europe said:

they did, it was called the decent homes scheme

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/7812/138355.pdf

my experience of it is that the main target was sustainability, reducing energy loss etc, which if the recent refurb of this tower block was external cladding and windows and works to the heating sounds like what they did too

did see on the news a bloke outside the contractor, naming and shaming them and then naming and shaming the subcontractor who installed it too, no mention of the architect who would have specified the product and designed how it was installed...or the council project manager who signed off the works...or the building control officer who signed it off on building regs...

But then we would have to talk about policy in practice and that doesn't work with the anti-Conservative rhetoric.....also, if they talk about this in terms of practical delivery then different parties councils may find themselves exposed. 

[PaulC]

Surely its more to do with the type of material used in the cladding than shoddy workmanship.Similar cladding was used in high-rise buildings hit by fires in France, the UAE and Australia, 

[NurembergVillan]

 

[mjmooney]

[VillaChris]

22 hours ago, Demitri_C said:

I agree absolutely outrageous. In this day and age not even a effing fire alarm?

Guy who got out alive with his family from I think the 7th floor said there were alarms but they were too quiet and wouldn't have woken people up at half 1 in the morning to give them a chance of escaping.

[mjmooney]

Move to Tyneside? Bloody hell, haven't they suffered enough? 

[Demitri_C]

50 minutes ago, VillaChris said:

Guy who got out alive with his family from I think the 7th floor said there were alarms but they were too quiet and wouldn't have woken people up at half 1 in the morning to give them a chance of escaping.

It seems awful bad luck. 1am fire on a low floor as heat rises.

If it was at 1pm may have been less people in and the death toll lower

[Demitri_C]

35 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

Move to Tyneside? Bloody hell, haven't they suffered enough? 

But in all seriousness thats a loveky gesture 

[chrisp65]

I couldn’t even comment on this yesterday, absolutely the worst events, just a nightmare for those that have lost people. With no connection to the area or the people, this one really got to me. 
But I do think there’s a whole level of speculation that isn’t entirely informed yet.
Clearly a product has been used that has had a very poor spread of flame rating.
But we don’t know if the product installed was the product originally specified. We don’t know if the detailing was carried out in accordance with the specification or if that construction specification came from the manufacturer, the installer or the architect. An architect’s P.I. cover would often exclude inventing new unproven untested details, easier and more certain for everyone to take an existing system and specialist installer than try and reinvent a wheel. We don’t know who the Principal Designer was or whether the specification was detailed or performance based. Potentially, the contract was for a cladding firm to clad the building to give a u value of ‘x’ and look like the planning drawing. 
We don’t know the relationship between all the parties, who dealt with what Building Control company. Don’t presume the local authority Building Control was even involved, potentially the Landlord or the project management or the contractor have a favoured private building control firm. Also, the building control regulations are not the Part B document. That document is a way of achieving compliance, but the actual legislation is more subjective, the means of achieving compliance open to reasonable argument and negotiation. Without wishing to make a political point, you have private building control firms competing for work. If you have a relationship with a builder that puts a lot of work your way, it might be more open to more innovation. Regardless, the buck cannot stop with Build Control, they do not adopt responsibility for design. Not claiming for a minute anything like that has happened here, I don’t know any detail.
It could be that the product is perfectly safe on the outside of a building if detailed correctly, but the installer has got something wrong. It could be that somewhere in the procurement chain a buyer has swapped to an ‘or similar’ product that was cheaper or available more speedily to meet a programme date. It could be just one of any number of variables has gone horrifically wrong.
The ‘stay put’ advice is good advice in theory. The alternative is to advise a 24 storey building evacuation every time an alarm goes off in a communal area. Sadly here, it’s contributed to the disaster due to something going wrong, probably several things going wrong. For what it’s worth, a few years back I took part in the trial evacuation of One Canada over at Canary Wharf. With knowledge of when the alarms would go off and knowing it was an exercise, walking out from the 42nd floor took well over 90 minutes. So buildings are designed to minimise the need for evacuation. Clearly here, it’s been disastrous. But how long would it take for alarms to be ignored if every midnight alarm in a shared occupancy block meant getting up and getting out?

As an example on materials: Timber is a perfectly legitimate and safe building product. Most of us have it in our roofs, many of us will live in timber frame houses. Detailed and built correctly, it’s as safe a product as any, better than steel in some situations. A timber framed house burning down would not automatically mean anything. It wouldn’t lead to an immediate ban on timber, it wouldn’t automatically be the fault of any one member of the team.

There are lessons coming from this catastrophe. This will be alongside the 1979 Woolworth’s fire and Ronan Point in the lectures and lessons of the future. But let’s not jump the gun, we've got some excellent fire and accident investigators, let's give them time and space to work this out.
 

[snowychap]

4 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

But how long would it take for alarms to be ignored if every midnight alarm in a shared occupancy block meant getting up and getting out?

A very good point.

A few years back, I lived in what was effectively an HMO (a four storey victorian building with a couple of annexes) where the fire alarm (a really shrill, piercing noise that couldn't fail to wake anyone within a hundred yards of the building) went off with annoying regularity. It took new people who moved in about three or four occasions of it going off to ignore it and just put it down to a false alarm or someone burning some toast - they couldn't be doing with walking down two or three flights of stairs let alone twenty-four.

[MakemineVanilla]

2 hours ago, PaulC said:

Surely its more to do with the type of material used in the cladding than shoddy workmanship.Similar cladding was used in high-rise buildings hit by fires in France, the UAE and Australia, 

I am sure it is some kind of plastic for lightness and flexibility, but for something to function as a thermal insulator it usually has to include a lot of air in its construction, and it is being said that the lagging had an air-gap which created a chimney-effect.

Years ago there was a warning given to householders not to paint polystyrene tiles because the paint created a hard layer which formed a gap along which a fire could spread, so lagging would work the same.

It seems likely that there would have been a government grant to fit the lagging, it might even have come at zero cost, as does cavity-wall insulation.

It might have to be counted as one of the unintended consequences of Green policies.

Edited June 15, 2017 by MakemineVanilla

[hogso]

Just read that a guy who lives next to it was opening body bags, taking pictures, and putting them on facebook in an apparent attempt to identify them. Jesus. Glad I don't use that thing. He's been arrested.

[bickster]

https://youtu.be/UN3e-aYUusc