Grenfell tower

Industrialsize

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Borrowing funds to purchase a home is a personal financial decision. Ensuring payments and maintenance are made is my responsibility to improve my life, and perhaps to pass some downstream wealth to my family.

I guess we need to blame someone whenever a horrific, often unexplainable event takes place. It allows us to emotionally process and move on. Whether it's design flaws identified in plane crashes, security breaches, or building designs, we hope we learn following a tragety. But using the government as the scapegoat is not helpful. Government cannot be there to solve every problem. Not everyone wants big government to be involved in every aspect of our lives. Sometime too big is cumbersome.
Fear mongering about "big government" is a uniquely American phenomena, for the most part. Not so much so in Europe where socialized medicine etc is the rule.
 
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I think the fire service is a bit to blame here a well. I am not sure, I have not looked into it, but did they had advise people not to leave their apartments? Yet not fully investigating whether the fire was fully extinguished.

If this maybe the case, I can imagine these guys would be totally gutted to think they made a wrong call.
I actually agree with this.

The official block policy was to stay put. Also - and this is a fairly recent emergence - some who called the emergency services were told to stay put.

This would normally be fine, and if it weren't for the cladding, would still have been. The fire crews did a fantastic job, but they weren't aware that the flats were fatally flawed - and telephone emergency responders couldn't have known either.

Tragic - but not their fault really.
 
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Jjz1109

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Fear mongering about "big government" is a uniquely American phenomena, for the most part. Not so much so in Europe where socialized medicine etc is the rule.
.
Interesting that all that has been said in this thread about this tragedy, my post drew your first comment.

And for your reference, some liked my post.
 

Industrialsize

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scallylad85

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dandelion

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I see Grenfell tower on a daily basis.

They are now evacuating 5 tower blocks in the London Borough of Camden as they contain flammable cladding
isnt it odd that suddenly these people must be removed at once, when they are in no more danger today than they would have been 5 years ago, when tory ministers were alerted to the potential dangers.
 

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I found the cheapest cladding available here in the Netherlands, and it's 30 minutes fire resistant and has a profile without fire-prone debries. Falk (the company which makes these) advices to use these panels only on sheds and storages spaces.

https://www.falkbouwsystemen.nl/nl/producten/gevelpanelen/falk-1060-wb

For domestic uses they advice the 80mm 1100 model cladding, which is fire resistant up to 90 minutes (!!)

https://www.falkbouwsystemen.nl/nl/producten/gevelpanelen/falk-1100-tr-3-1

The contract-team which build a storage unit for me, used the 60 minute variant... And it wasn't to expensive, and i use it to store electronics and equipement.
 

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Borrowing funds to purchase a home is a personal financial decision. Ensuring payments and maintenance are made is my responsibility to improve my life, and perhaps to pass some downstream wealth to my family.

I guess we need to blame someone whenever a horrific, often unexplainable event takes place. It allows us to emotionally process and move on. Whether it's design flaws identified in plane crashes, security breaches, or building designs, we hope we learn following a tragety. But using the government as the scapegoat is not helpful. Government cannot be there to solve every problem. Not everyone wants big government to be involved in every aspect of our lives. Sometime too big is cumbersome.

A few things are to blaim to the UK government.

1) No help was available to tenants who had to leave the building, no sleeping arrangements, no food, no help, nothing. It was Londoners who helpt them, not their council. When an gasline blows here, people are taken care of by the fire department and taken to a hotel or -in the worst case- a makeshift bed in a sportsvenue.

2) Cladding like this has been banned in 22 countries and was under review by the safety regulations experts since 2009. If you can't work out, with previous fires as proof, that cladding like this is dangerous, you don't deserve to be in power. It's been under review for more then 7 years!

Governments need to regulate the way buildings are made and renovated. You can't put health and safety rules in the hands of people who cut corners to make a few extra bucks. You just can't, the shit you end up with, is shit like the Flint-water scandal, the Grenfell-tower fire and so on.

If your kids start out, and they don't have that much, they may need to rent such housing... better be safe then.
 

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Seems to be another bout of national insanity taking hold, evacuating tower blocks in the middle of the night because some inspector has suddenly discovered a fire risk. The issue of fire safey seems to be spreading and fire officers are pronouncing themselves dissatisfied with buildings which have been exactly the same for decades. then they are asking people to leave.

Its getting daft. Buildings are not suddenly bursting into flames. From ignoring the issue for years, politicians are now going into reverse. Like as not prompted by their insurance companies who refuse to acept an open ended risk just in case something bad happens. Yet the issue must be being exaggerated. Common sense says the buildings are safe. Statistics say they are safe. Ask someone alive at the time of the great fire of London if these modern buildings are safe, and the answer is they are all much safer than the buildings people lived in then.

There is no such thing as total safety, it is all a question of considered risk. From ignoring the matter politicians have flipped into panic mode and feel they must be seen to act now. Causing more problems for everyone.

Anyone who really wants to do some good and save lives, should cancel Brexit instead of panicking about tower blocks. No, I am not joking. Poverty kills.
 
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dandelion

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Oh this is ridiculous! Woman on the radio from some council saying that fireman had told her blocks in her area were not safe even if they stationed firemen in them all the time! That is utterly ridiculous. These are not unexploded bombs.
 
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Jjz1109

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I actually agree with this.

The official block policy was to stay put. Also - and this is a fairly recent emergence - some who called the emergency services were told to stay put.

This would normally be fine, and if it weren't for the cladding, would still have been. The fire crews did a fantastic job, but they weren't aware that the flats were fatally flawed - and telephone emergency responders couldn't have known either.

Tragic - but not their fault really.
Maybe something to consider for the future. Local fire departments can be trained on the materials, insulations, floor plan nuances, etc of the buildings in their jurisdiction. Assuming fire departments are engaged in periodic monitoring of buildings.
 
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chrisrobin

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Seems to be another bout of national insanity taking hold, evacuating tower blocks in the middle of the night because some inspector has suddenly discovered a fire risk. The issue of fire safey seems to be spreading and fire officers are pronouncing themselves dissatisfied with buildings which have been exactly the same for decades. then they are asking people to leave.

Its getting daft. Buildings are not suddenly bursting into flames. From ignoring the issue for years, politicians are now going into reverse. Like as not prompted by their insurance companies who refuse to acept an open ended risk just in case something bad happens. Yet the issue must be being exaggerated. Common sense says the buildings are safe. Statistics say they are safe. Ask someone alive at the time of the great fire of London if these modern buildings are safe, and the answer is they are all much safer than the buildings people lived in then.

There is no such thing as total safety, it is all a question of considered risk. From ignoring the matter politicians have flipped into panic mode and feel they must be seen to act now. Causing more problems for everyone.

Anyone who really wants to do some good and save lives, should cancel Brexit instead of panicking about tower blocks. No, I am not joking. Poverty kills.
for once I utterly agree with you, I look on in amazement at the follow, the stupid statements and wonder what sort of world we live in and, more to the point, if its even the real world!
 

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Whoever approved the cladding on these buildings, did so against the instructions of the manufacturer. They were never produced to be used on high rise buildings.

Someone is in big shit and we deserve to know who.
 
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for once I utterly agree with you, I look on in amazement at the follow, the stupid statements and wonder what sort of world we live in and, more to the point, if its even the real world!
Agreed. Where's the sense of perspective?

It's mass hysteria.
 

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Oh this is ridiculous! Woman on the radio from some council saying that fireman had told her blocks in her area were not safe even if they stationed firemen in them all the time! That is utterly ridiculous. These are not unexploded bombs.

Actually I think they are unexploded bombs.

The reality is that many blocks (now at least 27) have been wrapped in a substance which burns quickly. Now that people know this they are actually an arsonist's target, perhaps as some sort of hate crime. I think the response has to be prompt.

We still don't have clarity on whether a particular contractor used illegal material (some sort of imitation of the legal cladding) or whether the cladding was legal and therefore the law wrong. There's a lot of difference in responsibility between the two. However I don't see that the councils, whether Conservative Kensington or Labour Camden, can be held responsible. Will Corbyn repeat all his vitriol about Kensington now about Camden? Will he apologise for encouraging his rent-a-mob to storm Kensington council offices? Will he apologise to the victims of Grenfell for seeking to politice their tragedy?
 
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We still don't have clarity on whether a particular contractor used illegal material (some sort of imitation of the legal cladding) or whether the cladding was legal and therefore the law wrong. There's a lot of difference in responsibility between the two. However I don't see that the councils, whether Conservative Kensington or Labour Camden, can be held responsible. Will Corbyn repeat all his vitriol about Kensington now about Camden? Will he apologise for encouraging his rent-a-mob to storm Kensington council offices? Will he apologise to the victims of Grenfell for seeking to politice their tragedy?
Course he will. ;)
 

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A view from the States:
Why Grenfell Tower Burned: Regulators Put Cost Before Safety
LONDON — The doorbell woke Yassin Adam just before 1 a.m. A neighbor was frantically alerting others on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower about a fire in his apartment. “My fridge blew up,” the man shouted.

Residents of Grenfell Tower had complained for years that the 24-story public housing block invited catastrophe. It lacked fire alarms, sprinklers and a fire escape. It had only a single staircase. And there were concerns about a new aluminum facade that was supposed to improve the building — but was now whisking the flames skyward.

The facade, Mr. Adam said, “burned like a fire that you pour petrol on.”

The incineration of Grenfell Tower on June 14, the deadliest fire in Britain in more than a century, is now a national tragedy. The London police on Friday blamed flammable materials used in the facade for the spread of the blaze and said the investigation could bring charges of manslaughter. Hundreds of families were evacuated from five high-rises that posed similar risks.
............For years, members of Parliament had written letters requesting new restrictions on cladding, especially as the same flammable facades were blamed for fires in Britain, France, the United Arab Emirates, Australia and elsewhere. Yet British authorities resisted new rules. A top building regulator explained to a coroner in 2013 that requiring only noncombustible exteriors in residential towers “limits your choice of materials quite significantly.”...............
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/world/europe/grenfell-tower-london-fire.html?_r=0
 

southeastone

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Seems to be another bout of national insanity taking hold, evacuating tower blocks in the middle of the night because some inspector has suddenly discovered a fire risk. The issue of fire safey seems to be spreading and fire officers are pronouncing themselves dissatisfied with buildings which have been exactly the same for decades. then they are asking people to leave.

Its getting daft. Buildings are not suddenly bursting into flames. From ignoring the issue for years, politicians are now going into reverse. Like as not prompted by their insurance companies who refuse to acept an open ended risk just in case something bad happens. Yet the issue must be being exaggerated. Common sense says the buildings are safe. Statistics say they are safe. Ask someone alive at the time of the great fire of London if these modern buildings are safe, and the answer is they are all much safer than the buildings people lived in then.

There is no such thing as total safety, it is all a question of considered risk. From ignoring the matter politicians have flipped into panic mode and feel they must be seen to act now. Causing more problems for everyone.

.

Maybe if corbyn had not politicised the whole tragedy a more rational view could have been taken now on a problem that in a lot of cases was created before the conservatives came to power.
 
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A view from the States:
Why Grenfell Tower Burned: Regulators Put Cost Before Safety
LONDON — The doorbell woke Yassin Adam just before 1 a.m. A neighbor was frantically alerting others on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower about a fire in his apartment. “My fridge blew up,” the man shouted.

Residents of Grenfell Tower had complained for years that the 24-story public housing block invited catastrophe. It lacked fire alarms, sprinklers and a fire escape. It had only a single staircase. And there were concerns about a new aluminum facade that was supposed to improve the building — but was now whisking the flames skyward.

The facade, Mr. Adam said, “burned like a fire that you pour petrol on.”

The incineration of Grenfell Tower on June 14, the deadliest fire in Britain in more than a century, is now a national tragedy. The London police on Friday blamed flammable materials used in the facade for the spread of the blaze and said the investigation could bring charges of manslaughter. Hundreds of families were evacuated from five high-rises that posed similar risks.
............For years, members of Parliament had written letters requesting new restrictions on cladding, especially as the same flammable facades were blamed for fires in Britain, France, the United Arab Emirates, Australia and elsewhere. Yet British authorities resisted new rules. A top building regulator explained to a coroner in 2013 that requiring only noncombustible exteriors in residential towers “limits your choice of materials quite significantly.”...............
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/world/europe/grenfell-tower-london-fire.html?_r=0
It's ridiculous.

Surely when you build or face-lift any housing - especially hi-rise, the first questions you ask are, a. Is it safe? And b. How do people get out in an emergency? It's basic common sense.

Sanctioning flammable materials on residential buildings, on grounds of cost, would seem to go beyond mere neglect...
 

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The UK has had a previous fire spread by cladding - Garnock Ct, Irvine, in 1999. 18 years ago there was a fire that should have demonstrated the problem. Regulatory changes were not made.

The key legislation is the 2005 Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order - which in effect cancelled many recommendations. It seems that the construction lobby got what they wanted.

I suggest the seeds of this tragedy are in the failure to do anything after 1999 and the wrong changes of 2005.

Local authorities work within a legal framework when commissioning work. If the legislative view is that something is safe then the local authority must accept this. It is not possible for any local authority to decide to work to some alternative standards.