London Fire - Terrorism or Not? Bets!?

[Chris_Michael]

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/13/europe/west-london-fire/index.html

You guys know the drill. Bets on terrorism? Was the fire set or is it an accident? And of course, we all have to bet on race and religion!

Bets? White? Black? Muslim? Mormons?

I'm going with Muslim and WHITE!

 

[magicalmoments]

Latest reports on BBC are that the building was recently entirely reclad in a plastic material and that this is what caused the fire to spread so quickly and completely. Also, only one internal stairwell. Also a history of safety related complaints. Landlord was apparently the local city council. Seems to have been a lot of Muslim tenants.

I'm going for tragic accident or tragic negligence.

 

[Chris_Michael]

That plastic material may have, in fact, been Muslim.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Latest reports on BBC are that the building was recently entirely reclad in a plastic material and that this is what caused the fire to spread so quickly and completely. Also, only one internal stairwell. Also a history of safety related complaints. Landlord was apparently the local city council. Seems to have been a lot of Muslim tenants.

I'm going for tragic accident or tragic negligence.

Sounds from the news like it was a faulty fridge that sparked it off and the cladding just went up within a few minutes. Total disaster that apparently the tenants association had been warning about for years. No central fire alarm, no sprinkler system, only one fire escape, council owned social housing. Dozens of people feared dead.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Sounds from the news like it was a faulty fridge that sparked it off and the cladding just went up within a few minutes. Total disaster that apparently the tenants association had been warning about for years. No central fire alarm, no sprinkler system, only one fire escape, council owned social housing. Dozens of people feared dead.

Friend of mine has been doing some research on this.

Back in 2014 there was a bad fire in a Melbourne tower apartment tower - by great good luck nobody was killed, but it spread very quickly. The problem was traced back to non-compliant cladding.

The product's called Reynobond/Alucobest. It's available in two versions: one with a flammable polyethylene core, another with non-flammable mineral wool. The polyethylene-core version is only supposed to be used in low-rise buildings, for obvious reasons, but when you have two products that have the same name and look identical from the outside, and the flammable version is significantly cheaper, well, you can guess where that goes.

According to the plans, Grenfell Towers was also clad in Reynobond.

The plans don't mention which version was used for Grenfell Towers, but the contractor who did the cladding was having financial difficulties and went bust shortly afterwards, so it's not a big leap to think that they might have tried to save money by using the polyethylene version.

As Chloe mentioned, the residents have been warning for years about fire hazards in the building. I don't think they were aware of the cladding issue, but certainly it sounds as if the management were dangerously lax.

By my understanding, the building wasn't required to have a sprinkler system or a communal fire alarm; they are required for new construction, but Grenfell predated those rules. Obviously they're still a good idea, but they're not so important in a properly-built tower. If everything else is up to scratch, fires should be contained to a small area long enough for the fire brigade to get there and deal with it, and the safest option is for residents to stay in their own flats instead of trying to get out.

But if the building isn't up to scratch, well, that's suicide. :-(

Moral of the story: spend less time worrying about terrorists and more time worrying about penny-pinching arseholes who see other people's lives as an acceptable gamble.

 

[oggbashan]

...

By my understanding, the building wasn't required to have a sprinkler system or a communal fire alarm; they are required for new construction, but Grenfell predated those rules. Obviously they're still a good idea, but they're not so important in a properly-built tower. If everything else is up to scratch, fires should be contained to a small area long enough for the fire brigade to get there and deal with it, and the safest option is for residents to stay in their own flats instead of trying to get out.

But if the building isn't up to scratch, well, that's suicide. :-(

Moral of the story: spend less time worrying about terrorists and more time worrying about penny-pinching arseholes who see other people's lives as an acceptable gamble.

It is very difficult to post-fit a tower block with a sprinkler system. The weight of water required at high levels could overstress the structure. It is impossible to add a second fire escape route to an existing building. Those are two reasons why many older tower blocks in the UK have been demolished after previous fires showed how dangerous they were.

Locally we were shocked by a fire in a low rise block of apartments. They were only three years old but the fire spread quickly across the block under the pitched roof. There were NO firebreaks between roof trusses for the whole length of the roof and the timbers had not been treated with fire-retardant.

We thought such construction methods had been banned after the Great Fire of London in 1666. Regulations by The City of London after then specified a stone or brick wall between homes. But apparently the local block of flats passed lower standards for 'affordable' high density homes. They have now been rebuilt with fire break walls but the value of each apartment has dropped. People don't want to live in a fire-trap.

 

[Chris_Michael]

If we took home the moral of the story, how would Americans find jobs? The only way to make it is by penny penching and seeing everybody else and hoping they are losses.

 

[Bramblethorn]

It is very difficult to post-fit a tower block with a sprinkler system. The weight of water required at high levels could overstress the structure. It is impossible to add a second fire escape route to an existing building. Those are two reasons why many older tower blocks in the UK have been demolished after previous fires showed how dangerous they were.

Yep. Even with multiple fire escapes, evacuating hundreds of people from a high-rise is slow, hence the emphasis on building for containment. In a properly-constructed building, it should take a fire more than an hour to break out of the apartment where it started. Obviously that didn't happen here. I suspect several people are looking at lengthy prison sentences.

All credit to the people who risked their own lives by running around to wake up their neighbours instead of just leaving immediately.

We thought such construction methods had been banned after the Great Fire of London in 1666. Regulations by The City of London after then specified a stone or brick wall between homes. But apparently the local block of flats passed lower standards for 'affordable' high density homes. They have now been rebuilt with fire break walls but the value of each apartment has dropped. People don't want to live in a fire-trap.

Yep. I think about events like this when I hear people complaining of over-regulation.

 

[nowisthetime]

It's only terrorism when the pigmentation is brown.