Grenfell Tower Fire
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@Hooroo said in Horrific Fire in London:
Poor damn fire fighters! What an awful day at work for them. Must be one of the toughest jobs.
Yeah, they must have felt absolutely helpless. You could see them blasting their hoses as high as they could but it was completely ineffective in the face of that massive blaze. That'll haunt them for the rest of their lives
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Nightmarish stuff.
When I lived in Oslo I often visited a mate of mine who lived in a building like this. The fire alarm went off a couple of times and he didn't give a shit. We would have been truly Friar Tucked if there actually was a fire. I also worked in an older building which had to be evacuated at least once a month due to fire alarms. If it hadn't been for the safety reps nobody would have moved.
This incident shows you can never be too careful with fire safety.
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Our nightmare - 24th floor of a 48 floor high rise, although we have sprinklers,
fire stairs, and lots of concrete with (supposedly) hard to burn materials. This sounds like they fucked up the material they used in the refit, which appears to have made things worse - while people were told to stay inside. -
I think isn't that in the case if the building is supposedly constructed properly, and the fire will not spread, or should not spread as rapidly as that one did, therefore to avoid panic?
Sounds daft to me and goes against natural instinct to be told to stay inside your flat while your building is on fire, but I think there is supposed to be some reasoning behind it?
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@taniwharugby I genuinely can't think of one. Fire climbs, so it's best to get beneath it. Fire stairs are supposed to be fire-rated, whereas your apartment isn't.
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@antipodean just going by what I have read/been reported, as I said, not something I would think is the best idea...
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@antipodean said in Horrific Fire in London:
@taniwharugby I genuinely can't think of one. Fire climbs, so it's best to get beneath it. Fire stairs are supposed to be fire-rated, whereas your apartment isn't.
We have the same advice at my work - however this building is very modern and if fire is detected on a particular floor, then fire curtains immediately come down to contain it to one area. That floor is then evacuated first before evacuating the other floors.
In this case it appears on the face of it to be really, really bad advice - keeping your doors closed (as it states on their fire safety notice) is absurd and will never keep you safe from a fire.
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An old building (sometime in the mid 70's) but refurbed in 2015. It is owned by the local council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, but they outsource management to a private contractor, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation. The cynic in me suggests that whoever wins the tender to oversee the council's properties is chosen mainly down to budget and it might be difficult to make ends meet on such tight margins. It reminds me of a quote from John Glen in relation tore-entering the Earth's atmosphere for the first time - something along the lines of "All I could think of was that each component of my spacecraft had been supplied by the cheapest contractor".
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Some stuff coming out now which is just staggering. All courtesy of the BBC:-
Construction firm Rydon, which carried out the refurbishment, initially said in a statement that the work met "all fire regulations" - the wording was omitted in a later statement.
The block - which was built in 1974 - did not have a sprinkler system. Under current law, all new residential blocks over 30m high must have sprinkler systems fitted. There is no legal requirement for local authorities to retrofit sprinklers to tower blocks. Ronnie King, honorary secretary of the All-Party Fire Safety and Rescue Group, told LBC there were about 4,000 tower blocks that did not have fire sprinklers fitted into them. He said after the fire in Lakanal House there had been a "recommendation, which was down to each local council and landlords to determine the appropriateness" of the lack of fire sprinklers in some blocks.
Some residents have also reported not hearing fire alarms. Alarms will often go off only on the floor affected, according to fire expert Elfyn Edwards.
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@Catogrande said in Horrific Fire in London:
Some stuff coming out now which is just staggering. All courtesy of the BBC:-
Construction firm Rydon, which carried out the refurbishment, initially said in a statement that the work met "all fire regulations" - the wording was omitted in a later statement.
The block - which was built in 1974 - did not have a sprinkler system. Under current law, all new residential blocks over 30m high must have sprinkler systems fitted. There is no legal requirement for local authorities to retrofit sprinklers to tower blocks. Ronnie King, honorary secretary of the All-Party Fire Safety and Rescue Group, told LBC there were about 4,000 tower blocks that did not have fire sprinklers fitted into them. He said after the fire in Lakanal House there had been a "recommendation, which was down to each local council and landlords to determine the appropriateness" of the lack of fire sprinklers in some blocks.
Some residents have also reported not hearing fire alarms. Alarms will often go off only on the floor affected, according to fire expert Elfyn Edwards.
Going to be interesting how this pans out.
If the cladding was legal, if the work undertaken was done to spec and signed off by the council then who do they prosecute?
What's really scary for people over there and other parts of the world is how much of this product is out there.
Not all will be wrapped around a 40 year old tower block with no sprinklers, dodgy fire systems and lax safety guidelines. But still.
Sounds like it was a perfect mix of what could go wrong did go wrong.
So heads roll, the council? Or does it go all the way back to the manufacturor of the cladding. -
@Virgil said in Horrific Fire in London:
@Catogrande said in Horrific Fire in London:
Some stuff coming out now which is just staggering. All courtesy of the BBC:-
Construction firm Rydon, which carried out the refurbishment, initially said in a statement that the work met "all fire regulations" - the wording was omitted in a later statement.
The block - which was built in 1974 - did not have a sprinkler system. Under current law, all new residential blocks over 30m high must have sprinkler systems fitted. There is no legal requirement for local authorities to retrofit sprinklers to tower blocks. Ronnie King, honorary secretary of the All-Party Fire Safety and Rescue Group, told LBC there were about 4,000 tower blocks that did not have fire sprinklers fitted into them. He said after the fire in Lakanal House there had been a "recommendation, which was down to each local council and landlords to determine the appropriateness" of the lack of fire sprinklers in some blocks.
Some residents have also reported not hearing fire alarms. Alarms will often go off only on the floor affected, according to fire expert Elfyn Edwards.
Going to be interesting how this pans out.
If the cladding was legal, if the work undertaken was done to spec and signed off by the council then who do they prosecute?
What's really scary for people over there and other parts of the world is how much of this product is out there.
Not all will be wrapped around a 40 year old tower block with no sprinklers, dodgy fire systems and lax safety guidelines. But still.
Sounds like it was a perfect mix of what could go wrong did go wrong.
So heads roll, the council? Or does it go all the way back to the manufacturor of the cladding.Like all of these things there will be a huge investigation that can't find any one fault or person to pin it on and everyone will go merrily on their way.
I get that guidelines were followed but those guidelines didn't write themselves. Somewhere someone signed them off for use that has proven to be totally inadequate. -
Yup just look at the CTV building collapse at the 2011 quake, over 100 died. Big concerns about its structural integrity and if it had a design flaw.
6 years on and no one has ever been charged or even seriously investigated for and failings. Gets brought up from time to time but nothing comes of it. -
@Virgil they were saying there are buildings in NZ with this cladding too.
I'm not a designer, inventor or anything flash like that, but you woulda thought when making a product for buildings such as these, being fire retardant would be a key thing to be testing, no?
It defies belief that a product would not go through rigorous fire/heat testing before being allowed on the market. I mean even if looking at shortcuts to keep costs down, this is still a key ingredient when you are selling the product!
Surely not a 'whats the worst that could happen' shrug when testers say this will burn quickly.
In another thread I mentioned there are insulation products in the NZ market, and some local councils will not approve building consents when that product is used, but some will....
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Installation of the cladding could still have been a factor and if that's the case then someone will get the finger pointed. From what has been said this cladding is insulation with a waterproof shell attached. There is a gap between the two and witnesses say that once the fire took hold it shot up and out presumably through the gap and the draw of air through it.
When the product is installed it is meant to have some "fire strips" put in place to stop this draft effect from happening. If they weren't there.....
The cladding certainly looks to the untrained eye as a major contributor though. It is how a small fire spread around a building and by-passed all the other fire safety measures. -
Often the impact of such stories falls away after a few days... but this is one of those where I feel no less a sense of helpless frustration and sheer fury than I did on day one. I've never lived in an apartment, so I just took things like sprinklers, working alarms, and messages to not sit and wait as a given.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11876701
