Looks about six floors high from what I can see.
― Matt DC, Sunday, 9 June 2019 17:38 (four years ago) link
https://news.sky.com/story/100-firefighters-tackle-six-floor-fire-at-flats-in-barking-east-london-11738455Wooden balconies by the looks of things.
― Matt DC, Sunday, 9 June 2019 17:39 (four years ago) link
that balcony material looking extremely flammable from the pic.
― calzino, Sunday, 9 June 2019 17:53 (four years ago) link
just heard a witness on the radio say something about no alarms going off.
― calzino, Sunday, 9 June 2019 18:03 (four years ago) link
the developer has been telling residents was fire resistant
I imagine 'fire resistant' in wood is much like my experience of 'water resistant' in clothing; it may resist a very brief exposure, or else a longer, but minimal exposure, but beyond that it soaks through. iow, it is a worthless marketing term, meant to suggest far more than it says.
― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 9 June 2019 18:04 (four years ago) link
I once worked on a new build childrens hospice that was mostly made out of wood, with some steel cladding and breeze. I kept commenting to colleagues that you wouldn't fancy the structures chances in a fire, but it was fire resistant wood blah blah someone said .. Part of it burned to the ground only a few years after it opened. I was mortified when it was reported an electrical fault was the cause.. but then it turned out to be a fault on on the high voltage supply side of the plant room, which we was nothing to do with thankfully.
― calzino, Sunday, 9 June 2019 18:11 (four years ago) link
https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/pms-chief-of-staff-did-not-act-on-multiple-warnings-about-fire-safety-in-months-before-grenfell-new-letters-show-61883
― mark s, Thursday, 13 June 2019 10:19 (four years ago) link
heads will roll ... by about 2040 when most of the criminally negligent bodies are already half dead.
― calzino, Thursday, 13 June 2019 10:25 (four years ago) link
Saw the tweet with that story when I woke up - have other places picked up on this?
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 13 June 2019 10:31 (four years ago) link
Grenfell report to be released..... 30 October.
― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, 9 October 2019 15:36 (four years ago) link
hollow lol
― now let's play big lunch take little lunch (sic), Wednesday, 9 October 2019 16:52 (four years ago) link
Lunchtime update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:- Rydon manager gloated about being 'quids in' as he discussed profit boost company would get through switching cladding to deadly ACM pic.twitter.com/qBmuZuamep— Peter Apps (@PeteApps) September 7, 2020
― stet, Monday, 7 September 2020 16:58 (three years ago) link
https://i.imgur.com/78x2Q8b.jpg
― stet, Monday, 7 September 2020 17:00 (three years ago) link
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/16/fire-test-for-grenfell-foam-cladding-panels-was-rigged-admits-ex-employee
It's bizarre how little noise the Grenfell enquiry is making when stuff like this is happening.
― Scampo di tutti i Scampi (ShariVari), Tuesday, 17 November 2020 10:09 (three years ago) link
i would like to understand more about how the intense anger and extensively held sentiment of 'never again' at the time translates over time into something that seems to be treated with indifference.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 17 November 2020 10:26 (three years ago) link
absence of obvious path citizens can take to effect change would be a big part of it, I'd imagine
― Change Display Name: (stevie), Tuesday, 17 November 2020 10:30 (three years ago) link
Like, once concerned people have signed the digital petition and expressed anger on social media, I don't know if it's clear what they can do *next*. Write to their MP? My MP was tweeting the above story at breakfast, he's already engaged. But where to place that anger next? And if it is not put into action, does it dissipate?
― Change Display Name: (stevie), Tuesday, 17 November 2020 10:33 (three years ago) link
calculated news displacement - it's baked into the ideology of many newspapers/commentators and their surround nexus of politics to not really care, and may be in their interests not to give it salience
― scampus fugit (gyac), Tuesday, 17 November 2020 11:28 (three years ago) link
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?
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 17 November 2020 11:29 (three years ago) link
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.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 17 November 2020 11:32 (three years ago) link
but yes, i have *somewhat* benign view of 'people' probably based on my socio-economic (and indeed gender) definition.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 17 November 2020 11:33 (three years ago) link
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.
― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 17 November 2020 11:34 (three years ago) link
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).
― scampus fugit (gyac), Tuesday, 17 November 2020 11:57 (three years ago) link
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.
― stet, Tuesday, 17 November 2020 12:50 (three years ago) link
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.
― Fizzles, Tuesday, 17 November 2020 13:19 (three years ago) link
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.
― spruce springclean (darraghmac), Tuesday, 17 November 2020 13:27 (three years ago) link
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.
― scampus fugit (gyac), Tuesday, 17 November 2020 14:02 (three years ago) link
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.
― stet, Tuesday, 17 November 2020 15:31 (three years ago) link
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.
― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 17 November 2020 22:45 (three years ago) link
very good and angering summary of the corporate and regulatory responsibility for grenfell by anoosh chakelian in the NS.
― Fizzles, Monday, 14 December 2020 18:34 (three years ago) link
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.
― calzino, Tuesday, 9 March 2021 13:12 (three years ago) link
well of course hes going to say that, its his product.
― micah, Wednesday, 10 March 2021 06:48 (three years ago) link
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.
― calzino, Wednesday, 10 March 2021 08:30 (three years ago) link
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
― mookieproof, Wednesday, 15 June 2022 03:41 (one year ago) link
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
― Piedie Gimbel, Wednesday, 15 June 2022 08:43 (one year ago) link
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
― mark s, Saturday, 23 July 2022 15:11 (one year ago) link
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
― xyzzzz__, Saturday, 23 July 2022 17:35 (one year ago) link
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/multiple-firefighters-who-saved-lives-28941465
― StanM, Friday, 13 January 2023 07:47 (one year ago) link
"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"
― StanM, Friday, 13 January 2023 07:48 (one year ago) link
:-(
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 13 January 2023 12:02 (one year ago) link
this is doubly grim bcz attached to this particular event but i assume the issue is baked in to all modern fire-fighting
― mark s, Friday, 13 January 2023 12:53 (one year ago) link