Obviously the investigation into the fire is still underway. However some interesting suggestions have been made in professional and trade journals.
Fire Brigade statements on the fire didn't say where they think the fire started
but did say
The whole of the building was affected by the fire, including scaffolding surrounding the property and the roof.
Last Tuesday the trade journal Construction News published an article 'Questions raised over scaffolding’s role in Dagenham blaze' (
archived here) but this appeared to be reporting speculation.
However on Thursday a blog post was published by the Institution of Fire Engineers.
Fire risk in buildings under construction and renovation - Institution of Fire Engineers
It said this about the Dagenham fire
According to preliminary investigations, the fire may have started from building materials kept on the scaffolding, which accelerated the spread due to the materials' flammability and the scaffolding's open, vertical structure, which can operate as a chimney.
The IFE are a long established and respected global professional body, which amongst other things awards fire engineering qualifications, and consequently this statement has been picked up in the trade press.
On Friday -
Early probe points to building materials as Dagenham fire source - Construction News (archived)
Today -
Dagenham fire started from materials kept on scaffolding, initial probe suggests - Housing Today (Chartered Institure of Housing) (archived)
And similar stories on other sites.
As the IFE blog post states this is the result of 'preliminary investigations'. However the scaffolding certainly seems to have played a role in the fire spread.
The external face of the building most affected by fire damage was the south elevation. This is from a 2013 drawing submitted to Barking and Dagenham planners. (The building was converted from office to residential in 2014-15).
On the left is one of the two staircase blocks and on the right the other and the lift block. These were part of the original concrete building but extended upwards, also in concrete, to serve the two floors added during the conversion. At the fifth floor level you can see a long balcony stretching the width of the building (marked in red). On the other floors you can see two balconies (marked in red) on each level. Here is a letting agents picture of what the south elevation looked like after conversion.
Note the brightly coloured panels dividing the balconies.
The remediation contract taking place at the time of the fire was replacing unsafe non-compliant materials added during the conversion to residential. This included the Trespa HPL cladding panels in the cladding system on the top two floors and also those coloured panels dividing the balconies. On August 19th, a week before the fire, Valcan the supplier of the new compliant cladding panels and balcony panels posted about this contract to their Facebook account. (
Original Facebook post here and for those who don't do Facebook
an archived version here). I think there are a couple of interesting things about this post but one is this photo of the scaffolding on the south elevation before the fire.
On the left the hoist in front of the staircase block on the right the lift block. Note that the two balconies on each of the lower floors protude through the scaffolding. The green scaffolding netting runs up to the balconies and then starts again the other side. You can't see it but the scaffolding boards also run up to the balconies and start again the other side. Effectively the balconies divide the scaffolding into three sections. If you look at
the larger version of the picture here you can see that the original unsafe coloured balcony dividers have been removed.
On the day of the fire drone footage was taken of the building and the firefighting operations. Sky put up
a 30 minute YouTube clip of the footage taken by the drone as it circled the building.
Here are two screencaps of the south elevation. First a shot of the whole elevation. Ignoring the gutted top floors for the moment, note the fire damage is to the 'central' section of the scaffolding and the balconies on either side.
Here's a closer shot ( a
larger version of it is here).
In the section of scaffolding to the left of the left hand balconies the scaffolding boards are undamaged, some of the netting is intact and there is no sign of damage to the UPVC windows. In the section of scaffolding on the right you can make out that the scaffolding boards are damaged nearest the right hand balconies but are still there, the netting has gone and there is damage to the UPVC windows although elements of many of them are still in place.
Contrast that with the central section between the balconies. The lowest parts of the scaffolding have collapsed, the scaffolding boards are all gone, presumably forming part of the pile of ash and debris on the ground. The UPVC windows have completely gone on all floors and the fire has evidently got into all of the flats and the ground floor commercial unit.
There were other combustible materials on this face of the building. The balconies had wooden decking (see a
lettings agent photo here). In addition to the UPVC in the widows, the lowest pane of each of them was not glazed but had a panel of the same combustible Trespa HPL as the cladding system on the top floors. (The remediation contract was supposed to replace all of these). But unlike the top floors there was no cladding system on the walls up to the fourth floor. The original concrete walls had been cleaned and rendered.
The scaffolding certainly appears to be the means by which the fire has spread in this section.
Still obviously this doesn't address all of the issues in this fire. We don't know where the fire started and whether it was travelling up or down this section of scaffolding. The top two floors were gutted. (See the drone footage I posted in post 16 above). The two floors added during the conversion to residential were timber framed. Lots of buildings are timber framed but there have been some serious fires in badly constructed timber framed structures. Then there are the questions over the fire management arrangements: the fire alarms not going off, the fact that smoke appears to have rapidly spread through the common parts, that gates were locked, and so on.
