Fire at Grenfell Tower in London

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JuFvCbwAMOs/WT7IVw7PQOI/AAAAAAAACUM/ZY70LiRCwRQ89ms7AjAWnlgWjYqRbI0OwCLcB/s1600/kensington_map.png

The Standard are running an appeal but replies to George 'Keep Britain Austere' Osborne's tweets right now are fractious to say the least.

yes, sorry stet, i wasn't having a go -- the political point you're making is entirely correct

Government have also been pushing back against installing sprinkler systems in tower blocks and care homes, despite fire service advice.

Landlord spent £10million to put cladding to make building look pretty (for surrounding rich) for 300k they could have sprinkler system.

ffs, i feel sick :(

Where are those figures from?

from a UK rapper on twitter admittedly, but evidence suggests even if the figures are wrong the rest is true.

A sprinkler system is unlikely to have helped

How do you work that one out?

If a sprinkler system only saved one solitary life it would have made a difference ffs!

Inflammable cladding obv. preferable.

Ilx is very lucky to have a fire safety expert on the thread tho.

Sprinklers are designed to contain fires not put them out, and they work better in contained areas. This fire looks to have spread primarily through the outside of the building and would have been too severe to be controlled by sprinklers when it came back into the building. The scandal is the cladding and there are also question marks over the effectiveness of the fire doors.

"This fire looks to have spread primarily through the outside of the building and would have been too severe to be controlled by sprinklers"

Nobody knows this for certain at this point, with all due respect.

Of course.

Oh, you just felt like doing a lawyer routine then.

Son Of Dorke

calz step back a second. Kozelek is just laying out some info it seems to me

sorry, but presenting shit opinions as facts is bs. But I am a bit angry atm and will step back for the good of the thread.

Thank you Tracer. Like calzino says it is impossible to be certain of anything at this stage. I'm not trying to present anything as fact, feel free to take me with a pinch of salt.

I'm not an expert by any means but I did work in this area for a couple of years. This is an extremely unusual fire.

Tell you what might have helped, a fucking fire alarm.

I heard a tenant on the radio this morning say that there was no central alarm, her own smoke alarm only went off when she opened her door to see what was happening

I have worked on shitloads of flat refurbs in the north and have never seen one without a fire alarm before. I think even some of the four storey maisonette ones had fire alarms.

Out of interest did you notice if there were alarms in the communal areas as well as individual flats?

the idea that a 24-storey building wouldn't have fire alarms is absolutely horrifying

This seems like the alarms were in the communal areas but not in the indiv flats.

Someone on TV said she left the flat after a friend phoned her to tell her the building was on fire. She did say she heard alarms while getting out.

From my experience a lot of buildings like this are covered by battery operated domestic smoke alarms in the flats and nothing outside them. I believe it's about encouraging people to stay in their flats (which is supposed to be safer than running into a fire in the communal areas). I've always found the lack of a proper alarm bizarre.

I can remember on quite a few jobs in Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield where there were smoke alarm sensors all wired in miic cables to the top in the communal areas. I always assumed there is an alarm panel in every big building. But admittedly I have been out of that game for half a decade now.

And all the flats in Bradford had hard-wired smoke, heat and C02 detectors on a dedicated circuit.

There's going to be a huge fallout from this. It wouldn't surprise me at all if fire safety regulation was changed as a result.

Better be some KingsX level changes here.

I see deregulating house building was item #1 on the "cut red tape" Brexit plan

i'd be shocked if the building complied with fire safety regulation as it is

Nbd flammable cladding affixed w/wood seems fine

ffs! Couldn't they just have give it a lick of paint if it was giving the rich folks nausea?

That is what they did to the dilapidated tower blocks in Hudds before the royal visit.

Not as if regs would make damn all difference if your level of enforcement over there parallels with ours, though we've had occupied apartment complexes vacated and shut down on foot of inspections in the past few years, which is....at least something (if not much comfort to the individual homeowners/renters)

shocked residents in my own building already discussing via email to fast-forward safety measures we've had tabled since a fire-safety inspection (the first ever) last year

we're collectively our own landlord, so literally no one here to look to or blame but us, but even so everything that costs money (as these measures will) always gets put off :(

Knock on wood but at least this is one area of public administration Trump can't really fuck up for us. Horrible news.

i was reading somewhere that the new cladding panels themselves should have been okay, but they might have had non-retardant insulation fitted behind them (residents had complained of coldness in the winter)

in retrospect using kerosene-soaked newspaper as the insulation may have been a mistake

sorry i shouldn't have posted that - sarcasm is my kneejerk response to fury

So many buildings in London have been reclad over the last five years or so that there could be dozens of places that are similarly vulnerable.

My mum lives in a tower block that's recently been reclad but it's definitely high spec insulated and fully rendered on to of the insulation. Also, in Scotland, all rented accommodation, whether privately rented or social housing, needs to have a hard wired smoke and co2 detector but backed up by battery in case the wiring fails. Also all communal areas and front doors to properties have fire doors. Those have been the regs for several years now. I cannot believe this tower was recently refurbished with seemingly flammable materials.

It's really upsetting, all of this.

Brexit of course partly motivated by a wish to avoid these stupid lifesaving measures

https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2016/jan/15/tory-landlord-mps-housing-bill-private-rented

That is the problem when a load of scumbag landlords (in the PLP as well) can vote down housing bills in parliament.

It's important not to politicise this, so if we can all come together to hang this Ian-Gibson-drawn motherfucker, that would be good.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/theresa-mays-chief-staff-sat-10620357

Ugh.

the level of failure on so many levels here is just heartbreaking and infuriating and appalling and, more than anything, eminently fucking avoidable

xpost well this is it. my very broad brushstroke on the social function of the media prior to the upheavals brought about by the internet and 24 hour news is to be the eyes and mouthpiece of their readership. in some respects the fact this ever overlapped with the key business model of 'keeping the ads apart' is a bit of a mystery, unless you assume that people were interested and willing to pay for a newspaper that found out things beyond that which was obvious - muckraking, investigative journalism, newsgathering - and also the professionalisation of that group.

Point about the 'mouthpiece' bit, is that it allowed newspapers to amplify editorially their readership's concerns to push back against public and private institutions. This view has mutated to a degree to the point where rather than 'amplify' we would say they 'create' their readership's concerns to have power over the rule-setting space of government.

I think a lot of the above is also bloody naive - newspaper ownership self-interest, readership and politics have always uneasily co-existed, and the editorial decision about what their readership cares about ≠ some sort of objective social good.

However, to your point stevie, in terms of that mouthpiece role, social media has given a lot more voice, but to a lot less end - it's less focused and amplified, there's more frustration in the process, maybe? It's become axiomatic that awareness - the 'eyes' part of that equation - has become a lot more editorially confused and undifferentiated, for good and bad. An editorial team does not decide what you see in the morning.

Started this post before a meeting, had the meeting, and now feel it's become a bit rambly to no end. so just hit 'post' i guess?

This is giving much too good faith but is probably the closest reason. The lives of those who died at Grenfell fundamentally don’t matter to the country as a whole, they were the wrong kind of people. You see this pattern repeated over the decades and even centuries, if the deaths at Hillsborough mattered to anyone outside Liverpool, then the Sun would have ceased to exist long ago. If Grenfell was to matter, then Amber Rudd wouldn’t have been welcomed back to cabinet six months after having to resign by the press, and there would be more interrogation of the fact that ordinary people were burning replica Grenfell Towers in their bonfires and sharing the videos. It’s all built on structural racism from the ground up but it comes down to the same thing: their lives didn’t matter to the government or to the press, and therefore the public.
― scampus fugit (gyac), Tuesday, 17 November 2020 11:28 bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, Hillsborough is an important comparison isn't it. There did seem to be a lot of widespread anger at Grenfell (and again, through what medium could i possibly know that - that mixture of the people i know, my social media vectors, and the mainstream media, and what sort of objective synthesis is *that*? but anyway).

it comes down partly to a question of agency. i'm not sure if this is even a meaningful statement, but i tend towards most people caring - ie 'something should be done' - if you took them through Grenfell, or asked them specifically.

but yes, i have *somewhat* benign view of 'people' probably based on my socio-economic (and indeed gender) definition.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast still going strong, even after Eddie Mair's departure:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p066rd9t/episodes/downloads

It won gold at the British Podcast Awards but is getting zero promotion by the corporation.

There did seem to be a lot of widespread anger at Grenfell (and again, through what medium could i possibly know that - that mixture of the people i know, my social media vectors, and the mainstream media, and what sort of objective synthesis is *that*? but anyway).

Grenfell will be back, but not yet. British media is exceptionally bad at keeping sustained attention on slow-developing things.

There are a lot of factors behind that, but two key ones are the rules around court reporting - effectively, during a trial you can only report what was said in court on the day and it's very hard to give colour/context/background = often boring stories – and the public's attention, which moves on to things with clearer edges to them and ignores the boring/confusing ones.

This isn't just a Grenfell thing, it's playing out right now in eg the Assange hearings, and people paying close attention to them have despaired at the paucity of coverage it's getting. However, I'd expect them to go big on Jan 4 when the hearing returns and they can add in all the other stuff. (Although Brexit might well take up all the oxygen at that point).

Governments know all this, which is why they drape an inquiry over things they want to buy time on, or get the public to stop caring about. Even though inquiries don't have quite the same reporting restrictions, there's still this sense of "we'll talk about this when the inquiry reports back".

80% of the time, by the time the inquiry reports back, the public doesn't care any more and the government gets away with it. 20% of the time it doesn't. (And if they're certain it's going to fall into the 20%, they do other things to nobble it, like with Chilcott. Hillsborough is a special case but cuts similarly – the Taylor report bought them a bit of time, and did lead to real change, it just avoided actual justice)

I think Grenfell is in the 20% camp. Not just because of the genuine outrage and anger at the events, and the clear villains of the piece, but more coldly because its impact cuts across a lot of society. There are a lot of better-off people in cladded buildings unable to sell their dangerous homes – 20,000 buildings directly, more indirectly. There are very well-off people realising quite how shoddy construction standards have become, too. Sunday Times did a big piece just the week on a big Richmond estate that had a building burn down rapidly and it was all down to shit building regs and inspections, and one of the country's biggest builders was at fault.

I've been trying hard to avoid fire metaphors here, but this has all the hallmarks of something big biding its time.

great post stet, and of course - smacks forehead - i'd forgotten about the court reporting. it was interesting watching the attacking the devil documentary on the Insight team's investigation into Thalidomide, the gyrations they had to perform to manage that sustained campaign. And indeed my point about campaigning came directly from Harold Evans saying in that documentary that the moment when people internally are potentially getting bored with a campaign is exactly the moment you shouldn't give up.

aside from Hillsborough, the other example that springs to mind- for a number of reasons- is bloody sunday tbh

at the end of a marathon effort lessons will have been learned and apologies will issue, the structural (and indeed deliberate/necessary) underpinnings of why these things happen to the people they happen to, where they happen will have transformed sufficiently such that the govt of 2045 can confidently say "never again" and no individuals will be to blame because the situational aspects will have been ignored, disputed or obfuscated for long enough for time and distance to have done their work.

Yes I have a lot to say on that too ofc but I’m lacking Stet’s faith in the process given the government are trying to make Bloody Sunday retroactively legal and the press are doing a lot of work to cover it for them.

yeah I've got no faith in the process — it has evolved as if by design to help cover things up and smother outrage. But that only works if people allow it, and I have a degree of hope that this won't happen in this case.

stonking package on the 10 debunking the social housing “charter” but weirdly nothing about the current inquiry. couldn’t find a link to the video on the BBC News site.

very good and angering summary of the corporate and regulatory responsibility for grenfell by anoosh chakelian in the NS.

Lunchtime update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

Cavity barrier manufacturer says installation of barriers on Grenfell was "some of the worst I have ever seen" pic.twitter.com/L39pnd07dR

— Peter Apps (@PeteApps) March 9, 2021

Chris Mort carried out an examination of the way his product had been installed after the fire in 2018. Says he believes there were areas where the products either weren't fitted at all or stuck on with sillicone instead of fixed with a bracket

unfuckingbelievable. You don't need to be a barriers expert to know that sticking important safety components with fucking silicone is rough as.

well of course hes going to say that, its his product.

I wouldn't expect lying at a public inquiry is beyond the realms of possibility but if the barriers really were stuck on with silicone rather than with the brackets, then he'd right calling it a cowboy installation.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVUn3zMVoAAEw9n?format=jpg&name=small

lives could have been saved -- but at what cost?

see also, from today

This is such a powerful first-hand account from ⁦@MichaelSchuman⁩. “The state may have prevented COVID deaths better than many liberal democracies. But that success has come at great cost—to human dignity and to the human spirit.” https://t.co/YUZVxydtLC

— Josh Lipsky (@joshualipsky) June 14, 2022

drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,

— wint (@dril) May 9, 2014

strong essay by peter apps on the grenfell enquiry so far:

https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/home/home/the-grenfell-tower-inquiry-has-painted-a-vivid-picture-of-the-world-we-must-leave-behind-76600

Excellent, especially the last few remarks.

This also seems relevant.

How did one of the world’s wealthiest economies end up with housing so unfit for extreme weather? I wrote about how Edwardian moralising, cheap coal and Thatcher's bonfire of housings standards has left British homes unprepared to weather climate change. https://t.co/2eDJLlHb5R

— Phineas Harper (@PhinHarper) July 20, 2022

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/multiple-firefighters-who-saved-lives-28941465

"Up to a dozen firefighters who saved lives at the Grenfell Tower have been diagnosed with cancers; the majority of which are understood to be digestive cancers and leukaemia, for which there is no cure"

:-(

this is doubly grim bcz attached to this particular event but i assume the issue is baked in to all modern fire-fighting