Social London apartment tower in flames

This is just a complete mess!!! I heard they are making people leave the compromised apartments until they can change the cladding.
 
British authorities ran their tests and came to a shocking conclusion: cladding with plastic cores would burn like a matchstick, just like their manufacturer said they would.

Now the British government is trying to convince the public that the U.K's fire safety rule is not as pathetic as their residents have complained for decades, and no doubt will try to place the blame on the American manufacturer for exporting to the U.K a product that was well within British laws and regulations.

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U.K. Officials Said Material on Tower Was Banned. It Wasn’t.
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK | JUNE 19, 2017

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LONDON — In the aftermath of Britain’s deadliest fire in decades, two senior officials sought to deflect blame from the government over the weekend by arguing that the type of building material believed to have spread flames rapidly up the 24-story Grenfell Tower had been banned under national fire safety regulations.

But experts on British fire safety rules say that the material, used as exterior cladding, in fact complied with regulations. Other countries, including the United States, have placed stricter restrictions on how such materials can be used, but Britain had not yet done so, they said.

The question of whether the cladding complied with national regulations — and whether those regulations were too lax — is a central part of the investigation into the horrific blaze last week. It will help determine how much blame falls on the government, and how much is assigned to the tower’s owners or builders.

The toll rose on Monday to 79 confirmed or presumed dead and was expected to climb further, making the fire the country’s deadliest in decades, perhaps since the early 20th century. It broke out at the West London tower early on Wednesday, lasted six hours and incinerated the building. Hundreds were left homeless. The government has announced a formal public inquiry, and a criminal investigation has been opened.

The material in the exterior cladding consisted of insulation sandwiched between two sheets of aluminum. The type used at Grenfell Tower is made under the Reynobond name by Arconic, a company spun off from the aluminum giant Alcoa last year. It was installed around the tower, which was built in 1974, in a renovation completed last year.

Critics of the material have warned for years that aluminum surface sheets can melt in a fire, after which flames could race through flammable insulation. If other protections fail and fire penetrates the cladding, “It is like you have got a high-rise building and you are encasing it in kerosene,” said Edwin Galea, director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich. “It is insanity, pure and simple.”

Such a runaway blaze appears to have been precisely what happened at Grenfell Tower. The flames engulfed the building in a matter of minutes, moving from the outside inward and emitting a dark smoke characteristic of burning insulation.

Recriminations over the failure to prevent the disaster and the sluggish response have contributed to a political crisis for Prime Minister Theresa May, whose Conservative Party lost its majority in a parliamentary election six days before the fire.

If Britain had already banned the material that appears to have spread the fire — as the ministers asserted on Sunday — that would move responsibility for the disaster away from the government and point instead to possible crimes by the tower’s owners and their contractors.

The use of the material is a sensitive issue for the British government because the United States and other countries years ago banned its application in tall buildings on the grounds that it was a fire hazard. In recent years, a series of highly publicized blazes in the United Arab Emirates and Australia has called attention to the problem and spurred more countries to adopt similar restrictions.

Philip Hammond, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a television interview on Sunday that he believed that Britain had done the same.

“My understanding is the cladding in question, this flammable cladding which is banned in Europe and the U.S., is also banned here,” Mr. Hammond said in an interview with Andrew Marr of the BBC. “So there are two separate questions. One: Are our regulations correct, do they permit the right kind of materials and ban the wrong kind of materials? The second question is: Were they correctly complied with?”

He added: “That will be a subject that the inquiry will look at. It will also be a subject that the criminal investigation will be looking at.”

Greg Hands, the minister for trade and investment, said in a separate interview with Sky News on Sunday that “my understanding is that the cladding that was reported was not in accordance with building regulations.”

But several British experts on fire safety said that the existing rules had not, in fact, banned use of the cladding, even in high-rise buildings like Grenfell Tower. The critical building regulation — Clause 13 of Appendix A of Document B — requires only that the exterior “surface of a composite product” used as exterior cladding must be “composed throughout of materials of limited combustibility.”

The sheets of aluminum believed to have been the “surface” around flammable insulation at Grenfell Tower would pass this test, even though the surfaces could, and did, melt in a fire.

“This is where it all falls down,” Arnold E. Tarling, a chartered surveyor and expert on fire prevention who is a member of the Association for Specialist Fire Protection, said in an interview. “The surface melts and it burns like a furnace.” But the cladding nonetheless “complied with the regulations,” he said.

The United States and other countries allow only low buildings to use such cladding because of the fire hazard. British regulations may seek to limit the spread of the flames by requiring builders to divide potentially flammable cladding with fireproof barriers at horizontal or vertical intervals. But engineers and experts say that such barriers have proven ineffective in other fires around the world. The flames can often circumvent them.

Along with the cladding, investigators are looking, among much else, at the absence of sprinklers and a centralized alarm system in the building, which is not uncommon for British apartment blocks as old as Grenfell Tower, and guidance that urged residents to “stay put” and await instructions if a fire broke out in someone else’s unit.

Many residents of the tower block are still unaccounted for, and the police have said that because of the intensity of the fire, some remains may never be identified.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/world/europe/uk-grenfell-tower-london-fire.html
 
Citing “inconsistency of building codes across the world”, Arconic pulled Renobond PE cladding from shelves worldwide

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The company that manufactures an element of the cladding believed to have contributed to the rapid spread of fire through Grenfell Tower has pulled the material from sale around the world.

Arconic said on Monday that is was discontinuing Reynobond PE, panels that are combined with insulation to form cladding that was revealed as flammable in the wake of the blaze that killed at least 79 people in west London.

The firm said it had stopped global sales of the material for tall buildings over concerns about the “inconsistency of building codes across the world”. Reynobond PE, one of several options offered by the company and not the most fire-retardant, has been banned for use on towers in countries including Germany and the US, but not the UK.

The manufacturer said in a statement: “Arconic is discontinuing global sales of Reynobond PE for use in high-rise applications. We believe this is the right decision because of the inconsistency of building codes across the world and issues that have arisen in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy regarding code compliance of cladding systems in the context of buildings’ overall designs. We will continue to fully support the authorities as they investigate this tragedy.”

The company emailed clients on Monday to tell them it would no longer sell Reynobond PE to buyers planning to use it on tower blocks. It said this would apply globally due to the difficulty of being sure that its material would be used in a way compliant with building regulations in multiple countries.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...ing-linked-to-fire-pulled-from-sale-worldwide
 
Grenfell tower fire and Portugese wildfires : how long before Jihadis start setting fires to forests and buildings? Like stabbings and using vehicles as weapons, setting fire is very easy compared to bombings and can be done easily by lone wolves.

9/11 was quite predictable because plane hijackings were well known , so it was only a matter of time before planes were used like suicide car bombs. Plus in the late 90s a Dutch cargo plane crashed into a block of flats destroying a large part of them and killings dozens.
 
ShinkanPo said:
Cant they count the number of missing? What about the list of residents?
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The article he posted made it very clear.

Police said "it would have been impossible for anyone to produce a list before that showed exactly who was in Grenfell Tower that night - that includes those people living there but also those visiting".

"What I can tell you is there are 129 flats inside Grenfell Tower. We, the police, have spoken to at least one occupant of 106 of those 129 flats," Det Supt McCormack said.

"These people have been able to tell us not just who lived in those flats, but importantly who was in those flats on the night."

The officer said 18 people connected to those 106 flats are dead or missing presumed dead but "it is a terrible reality that there are 23 flats where despite huge investigative efforts, we have been unable to trace anyone alive who lived there.

"At this stage, we must presume, that no-one in those 23 flats survived, that includes anyone who lived there or was visiting them."
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"Visitors" is ofcourse a euphemism for both the friends and families who came over to hangout on that faithful night, as well as people who aren't authorized to actually living there but moved in anyway with someone they know.
 
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ShinkanPo said:
Cant they count the number of missing? What about the list of residents?
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The problem is that a number of the flats were (illegally) sublet, so there isn't an true record anywhere of who actually lived in the building. They have just announced an amnesty on the illegal subletting if the sublettor lets the authorities know who was living there. I think that's the right idea, the subletting is a minor issue compared to identifying all the deceased.
 
MicroBrew said:
Grenfell tower fire and Portugese wildfires : how long before Jihadis start setting fires to forests and buildings? Like stabbings and using vehicles as weapons, setting fire is very easy compared to bombings and can be done easily by lone wolves.

9/11 was quite predictable because plane hijackings were well known , so it was only a matter of time before planes were used like suicide car bombs. Plus in the late 90s a Dutch cargo plane crashed into a block of flats destroying a large part of them and killings dozens.
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This is what I am saying in the Manila Casino a lone loser idiot was able to kill up 36 people by just firing rifle rounds in the ceiling terrifying people into hiding in rooms and then setting the place on fire trapping them.

imagine if there are at least two attackers and they really fired on the people that Casino attack could have been much worst. Terrorist are taking notes from all these mess that is happening all the world.
 
Arkain2K said:
Barely any fire alarms, no sprinkler system, expired fire extinguishers, no fire escape, only one entrance/exit, rules says to stay put in your apartment if a fire breaks out in the building.

It's been called a death trap by the Grenfell Action Group for the last 10 years to no avail, because that third-world living condition is completely legal under shitty British fire regulations.

Consider this: The initial 17 confirmed deaths were bodies recovered on the pavement. They had no choice but to jump out of their windows.
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The rules say to stay put in case of a fire.
That's really ... mind numbing
"Be satisfied with little reliable information as you calmly wait to possibly burn to death or run out of breathable air, don't move or try to escape"
 
Grenfell Fire Inquiry Opens Amid ‘Sense of Anger and Betrayal’
By DAN BILEFSKYSEPT. 14, 2017

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Flora Neda, in a wheelchair, a survivor of the Grenfell Tower fire, arrived on Thursday at the inquiry into the deadly blaze in London​

LONDON — A major public inquiry into the deadliest fire in Britain in more than a century opened on Thursday, with the retired judge who is leading the investigation citing a “sense of anger and betrayal” among former residents of Grenfell Tower in London, which was engulfed in flames in June.

The fire, which killed at least 80 people, began early June 14 after a refrigerator on the fourth floor of the high-rise apartment building burst into flames. The blaze ignited the building’s exterior cladding, shot up the side of the tower and transformed the 24-story structure into an inferno.

The inquiry’s leader, Martin Moore-Bick, said in his opening statement that he realized that the lives of Grenfell residents had been turned “upside down,” and he vowed to uncover the truth about what had led to the tragedy.

“We are acutely aware that so many people died and that many of those who survived have been severely affected,” Mr. Moore-Bick said. “We are also conscious that many have lost everything.”

“The inquiry cannot undo any of that, but it can and will provide answers to how a disaster of this kind could happen in 21st-century London,” he added.

Some residents have asked to be part of the inquiry team. But Mr. Moore-Bick said on Thursday, during the session at the Grand Connaught Rooms in central London, that he would not include them because he wanted to ensure the inquiry’s impartiality.

Mr. Moore-Bick said the inquiry, which is scheduled to produce an interim report by early April, would examine several questions and issues, including what caused the fire and why it spread; the regulatory framework for high-rise structures and how they may have contributed to the tragedy; the actions of the London Fire Brigade; and the response of the local authorities and the central government.

No evidence was presented on Thursday.

After the blaze, it emerged that the cladding was a less expensive and more flammable variety than the alternatives. That finding prompted anger and spurred accusations that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the local council that owned Grenfell Tower, had cut corners to save money.

The fire in the borough, which includes some of the wealthiest areas in the capital and some of the poorest ones, also underlined the social and economic disparities in London, and it raised questions about whether fire and safety regulations were being applied selectively.

The London police have mentioned “reasonable grounds to suspect” that organizations managing Grenfell Tower had committed corporate manslaughter.

Mr. Moore-Bick said that, while the law did not allow him to rule on criminal or civil liability as part of the inquiry, he would not refrain from pointing out blame based on the evidence.

In addition to the public bodies under scrutiny in the hearings, two American manufacturers — Arconic, which sold the combustible material used for the Grenfell cladding; and Whirlpool, which owns the company that made the refrigerator that started the fire — have also attracted criticism.

On Wednesday, the commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, Dany Cotton, said that the Grenfell disaster should be a “turning point” for fire safety in Britain, calling for sprinklers to be installed in all high-rise buildings. In 2007, regulations stipulated that all new towers over 30 meters, or about 98 feet, should have sprinklers, but the rules did not apply to older buildings like Grenfell Tower, built in the 1970s.

Former residents of Grenfell Tower have railed against what they say was the slow response of the Kensington and Chelsea council, and the authority’s leader, Nicholas Paget-Brown, stepped down. Three months after Prime Minister Theresa May vowed that every person who lost their home in the fire would be housed within three weeks, only 24 of 158 households have been placed in permanent housing.

After the investigation was announced, Mrs. May told members of Parliament that it would “leave no stone unturned.” But many residents have questioned whether the inquiry can deliver justice. Others have argued that it will be difficult to win the trust of survivors after previous missteps by the authorities.

Seraphima Kennedy, a former neighborhood officer for the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization, which managed Grenfell Tower, wrote in The Guardian newspaper this week that “there are significant concerns that justice will not be served.”

“There is a fear that those most affected will not get a seat at the table,” she wrote of the investigation. “This is crucial. Without building trust in the inquiry process, and placing victims, survivors and their families at the heart of the process, it will be doomed to failure.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/world/europe/uk-grenfell-fire-london.html
 
Bald1 said:
Can't think of a worse way to go - trapped inside a firebox with your loved ones.

This story belongs in the 1950s. I never would have imagined such a blatant disregard for the safety of tenants to go unaddressed in London. I mean lessons in fire containment in large population centers have been learned a long damned time ago.

Sorry, I have nothing to add to this thread other than my incredulity.
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incredulity noted.
 
ShinkanPo said:
Cant they count the number of missing? What about the list of residents?
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no. they have to try to identify them all first. The count and lists of residence can help with the identifying.
 
Botched refurbishment fuelled Grenfell Tower fire, says leaked report
Analysis for Met police reveals deficiencies beyond flammable cladding and insulation
Robert Booth | Mon 16 Apr 2018

The Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 claimed 71 lives.
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The Grenfell Tower fire was fuelled by botched refurbishment decisions that went well beyond the use of flammable cladding panels and insulation, a report for the Metropolitan police has reportedly revealed.

Gaps around windows, wrongly fitted cavity barriers meant to stop fire, and dozens of missing or faulty door closers were also responsible for helping to spread rather than limit the fire that claimed 71 lives in June 2017, according to details that emerged on Monday.
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A survivors’ group, Grenfell United, said the findings were shocking and showed “an industry that is broken”.

The analysis, seen by the Evening Standard, comes as the more than 530 core participants in the public inquiry digest a series of confidential technical reports commissioned by the inquiry chairman, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, parts of which, the Guardian understands, tell a similar story.

Those reports are expected to be made public when experts give evidence to the inquiry in June. Hearings start in earnest next month.

In parallel, Scotland Yard is investigating the blaze and has said it is considering possible manslaughter and corporate manslaughter charges.
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The technical report for detectives has been drawn up by BRE Global, the building research company that runs fire testing in the UK. It reportedly identified multiple “deficiencies” in the £10m recladding of Grenfell Tower between 2014 and 2016, which was carried out on behalf of the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, the social housing arm of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Cavity barriers that are meant to expand and seal the gap between the concrete surface of the building and the cladding in the event of fire were of “insufficient size specification”, the Evening Standard reported the experts as concluding.

They were designed to close a 25mm gap but were installed with a 50mm gap. Some were installed upside down or back to front and the failures “provided a route for fire spread”.

There were gaps of 15cm between the window frames and concrete columns that were filled by a rubberised membrane, rigid foam insulation and uPVC lightweight plastic panels, the paper reported.

The report said that “none of the materials used would be capable of providing 30 minutes’ fire resistance” and this allowed “a direct route for fire spread around the window frame into the cavity of the facade … and from the facade back into flats”.

It meant the first obstacle the fire encountered as it escaped from flat 16 was the window frame, which provided “fuel” instead of a barrier. “The construction of the window did not provide any substantial barrier to fire taking hold on the facade outside,” BRE reportedly said.

The investigation, dated 31 January 2018, also found that almost half (45%) of the door closers on the 120 flats between the fourth and 24th storeys of the tower were missing or not working, which meant doors were left open when residents fled, spreading smoke and fire into the single stairway for escape.

It confirmed that the aluminium cladding panels and the insulation foam were combustible and noted that some of the insulation did not have a manufacturer’s logo on it.
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Grenfell United said the findings were not surprising. “It was clear to us the refurbishment was shoddy and second rate,” the group said.

“We raised concerns time and time again. We were not just ignored but bullied to keep quiet. That a refurbishment could make our homes dangerous and unsafe shows that the contractors put profit before lives. It’s an industry that is broken. It’s also an industry that has been allowed to get away with this behaviour.

“Six people died in a fire at Lakanal House in 2009 and the government failed to act and make changes to regulations that would have stopped a fire like that happening again. Tonight we know people are going to sleep in homes with dangerous cladding on them. It is vital the police investigation and the public inquiry uncover everything that led to the fire and that the government now actually act so that this can never happen again.”

Scotland Yard and BRE Global are yet to comment on the report.

A spokesman for RBKC said: “We think the public inquiry and the police investigation are the right places for testing all the evidence as a whole. The council is clear – we have handed over thousands of documents – we are committed to finding the truth. We hope full disclosure of all the evidence, tested by the inquiry judge, will deliver the answers to ensure this never happens again.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...l-tower-fire-inadequate-claims-insures-report
 
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Grenfell Fire Inquiry Demands Radical Overhaul of U.K. Building Rules
By Richard Pérez-Peña | May 17, 2018http://www.nytimes.com/by/richard-perez-pena

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LONDON — Britain’s building safety systems are a lax and confused mess in need of a major overhaul and much tougher enforcement, an investigator commissioned after the Grenfell Tower disaster reported on Thursday, but she did not recommend banning all flammable facades, a critical factor in that fire.

The report drew swift rebukes from survivors of the fire, which killed 71 people, and from Labour members of Parliament, who have demanded a ban on flammable cladding of the sort used on Grenfell Tower, a move the Royal Institute of British Architects has also endorsed. That cladding has long been prohibited in the United States for buildings above a certain height, and in some places it is banned entirely.

Judith Hackitt, the engineer commissioned by the Conservative government to conduct the investigation, acknowledged the need for “a radical rethink of the whole system and how it works.” But she also maintained that her mission was to assess the big picture, not myriad individual rules. As a result, her 159-page report did not address specific changes people have called for, like a cladding ban or requiring sprinklers and multiple fire stairs in high-rise buildings.

“This review is a betrayal and a whitewash,” said David Lammy, a Labour lawmaker who has become an outspoken government critic. “It is unthinkable and unacceptable that so many people can die in a disaster like Grenfell and one year on flammable cladding has not been banned.”

Shahin Sadafi, chairman of Grenfell United, a survivors’ group, told the BBC that he was “disappointed and saddened” but would keep pressing the government for a ban.

Despite the criticism, Ms. Hackitt’s report amounted to a striking indictment of property developers and related industries, and the officials who police them. The rules and practices for high-rise apartment buildings, in particular, she wrote, have put the quest to get things done “as quickly and cheaply as possible” ahead of safety while letting owners skirt even the inadequate standards that exist, with little fear of being caught or punished.

The fire at Grenfell Tower, in the North Kensington section of London, on June 14 last year, was a trauma felt nationwide — the deadliest blaze in Britain in more than a century, in a high-rise where residents’ complaints about unsafe conditions had gone unheeded. It prompted sharp debates about the government’s long retreat from business regulation, and about the yawning gap between rich and poor who are sometimes neighbors in this city.

The country has a tangled mix of systems governing building materials, design, construction and maintenance, and a jumble of weak enforcement bodies. That, Ms. Hackitt reported, allows builders, landlords, materials suppliers and even government regulators to pass off responsibility onto each other — to the point that they often do not understand or even read the rules they are supposed to be following or enforcing.

Ms. Hackitt, a former chairwoman of the Health and Safety Executive, a government agency, expressed particular scorn for certain elements of government oversight.

“Where enforcement is necessary, it is often not pursued,” she wrote. “Where it is pursued, the penalties are so small as to be an ineffective deterrent.”

And the testing and approval of construction materials, a critical issue in the Grenfell fire, “is disjointed, confusing, unhelpful, and lacks any sort of transparency.”

She recommended creation of an agency, focused at first on residential high-rises, that would assume all the government roles, make standards f tougher and clearer, and greatly step up enforcement and penalties.

Those shifts would require action by the government. A spokesman for Prime Minister Theresa May said the government would make needed reforms, but did not commit to any specifics.

The new system should not be built solely on a thicket of narrow rules, Ms. Hackitt argued, because a legalistic adherence to those rules could still result in buildings like Grenfell that were unsafe. Instead, she wrote, the system must start with the big picture, stating the required safety results — like how much time people have to get out of a building — that must also be met. A structure that complied with the detailed rules but still did not meet the safety goals would not be approved.

Grenfell, a 24-story block, had an aluminum facade with a flammable plastic core, which allowed flames to spread rapidly up the exterior. That kind of cladding was legal in Britain, but tests conducted after the blaze showed that it failed fire safety standards, raising questions about how it had ever been allowed.

After the tests last year, the government concluded that 228 high-rise buildings around the country had unsafe cladding and ordered it removed, but property owners balked at the cost. Mrs. May said recently that the government would provide $540 million to pay for the work.

But the government has not banned other types of cladding that are more fire-resistant, but not fireproof.

“This is most definitely not just a question of the specification of cladding systems,” Ms. Hackitt reports, “but of an industry that has not reflected and learned for itself.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/17/world/europe/uk-grenfell-fire-safety-cladding-regulations.html
 
For a good while I worked in the insurance industy in Australia and went to a lunch event with representatives from all sorts of different areas within the industry. I happened to be at the table with an engineer who was working on identifying what buildings in the city that I live in had this cladding. He summarised the whole thing as 'it's fucked'. Apparently no-one knows what is on the buildings and no-one has any clear direction on what to do with the buildings if they are covered in this cladding. The insurance industry had no idea which buildings on its books were now a fire risk and the Government didn't have a plan at all.

This might be fear mongering but this kind of deregulatory action could have dire consequences.

But a few states and the District of Columbia have relaxed building codes in recent years and have started to permit the use of some cladding containing components that don't pass a fire test.
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In the United States, most jurisdictions don't allow this type of cladding for buildings higher than 40 feet. That is because they've adopted the International Building Code, which requires cladding for tall buildings to pass a rigorous test developed by the National Fire Protection Association called "NFPA 285." The purpose of the test is to ensure that installed cladding will be noncombustible.

In recent years, a few U.S. jurisdictions have eliminated this testing requirement when adopting the latest version of the International Building Code. They now permit cladding with combustible components similar to what was believed to be used on the Grenfell Tower, as long as the building has other fire safety measures in place, such as a working sprinkler system. (The Grenfell Tower reportedly did not have sprinklers.)
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FIMN said:
Sadiq's London, part and parcel.
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The refurbishment started in 2014 Khan wasn't elected until 2016 , BoJo's tory chums were the one that wanted to deregulate away the need for sprinklers and the like .
 
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