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Grenfell Tower fire in North Kensington - news and discussion

I've been talking to a friend in construction and thought I would share his POV about cladding. I haven't read the thread so I apologise if this is going to be repetitive. I just don't have time to read the thread.

Flammable cladding has been standard in England for decades. So has the 2 inch air gap, which allows rain to dry when it gets behind the cladding. Fire breaks are fitted in the air gap to prevent the terrifyingly rapid 'chimney effect' spread which we all saw. Some types of cladding burn more easily and quickly than others, but they all burn. The cheaper cladding typically has a 1 mm skin of aluminium and plastic filler. And plastic, being oil-based, gives off lots of thick, black smoke and poisonous fumes when it burns. When a cladding panel is cut so that something else, e.g. a pipe, can be installed through it, a piece of aluminium trim is added so that the filler continues to be protected inside a complete 'box' of aluminium. Other filler materials are also used, some of them being less flammable. This sandwich-type cheap plastic-filled cladding is on flats for rich and poor, offices, schools, hospitals, shops, factories etc. Not just for refurb, but also for new build. Pretty much every building site you pass has truckloads of the stuff going in - it's light, cheap and easy to fit. If a building is not skinned with expensive brick/stone/concrete/glass (not flammable), it's cladding. All of it flammable, and not that hard to set fire to, especially if you cut off or drill through the aluminium skin and hold a blowtorch to the filling, which is what the last week's shock-horror brand new 'safety tests' seem to consist of. From the media coverage they don't look as if they bear much relation to the accepted industry tests, in which a cooler flame is usually used. After a certain time the flame gets through the cladding. If the cladding can tolerate a flame at a certain temperature for a certain number of minutes before a hole appears allowing the flame through, the test has been passed. That's a gross oversimplication of testing but it gives you some idea.

There's a fire in a tower block pretty much every day. Fridge fires are about as frequent. But there've only been 2 cases of a fire shooting rapidly up the outside of a high rise because the cladding is burning. The other one was in 1999 in Scotland. After it, Scotland got a much tougher law about cladding:

How 1999 Scottish tower block fire led to regulation change - BBC News
BBC News | UK | Fire hits tower block
BBC News | UK Politics | Tower block fire safety fears
Urgent safety probe after tower block fire.

Because of understandable grief/horror/blissful ignorance, some people not in Scotland are saying 'why does everyone live in inflammable buildings, we must evacuate and/or remove the cladding'. Another way to look at it is 'why has this freak occurrence happened for only the 2nd time in 18 years? What was it about this fire and this building which caused the fire to spread? How did a fridge fire get outside the flat and into the cladding? Why didn't the fire breaks in the air gap inhibit the chimney effect?' Nobody knows. We're waiting for the inquiry. We do know, if Panorama was correct, that the fire crew who doused the fire in the flat did not look out of the window to check the cladding. That tells you how improbable the fire was. No doubt that fire crew are feeling pretty bad, but maybe they followed their training to the letter and did the usual excellent job? In the meantime everyone in construction is refusing to be mauled by the press, or by John McDonnell with his talk of murder, so they won't talk about it.
 
Pickman's model said:
no, the end of the poll tax was caused not by the riot but by the extent of non-payment. the end of the poll tax was announced in 1991 when bills were lowered by £140 (£136 in the case of wandsworth): while it would be good if the riots had ended the poll tax the simple fact of the matter is that mass working class action dealt the tax a knock-out blow.

as someone who was at all the national poll tax marches and active in haringey and camden throughout the poll tax, i think i might know something more of what went on than you do, being as you seem to be getting your information very much second - and perhaps third - hand.
Click to expand...

Yes. I was a tad too young, somewhat politically naive and not in London at the time but even I could tell that although the riot provided some powerful images on telly, it was ordinary and often quite elderly people saying on telly that they were prepared to go to prison rather than pay the poll tax that did it. Sorry for the excessive focus on how it came across on tv, but tv was almost the only window I had to the political world at the time.
 
And it's been found today that a block of student residences in Edinburgh has the same cladding as that used at Grenfell.

Article on BBC website (on phone, can't link).
 
I was thinking on the way home that the reason for wanting to evacuate the buildings is that the very process of removal may well increase the risks of fire.
 
Theresa May's answer to the Grenfell massacre is a big "fuck you all!!!" to all the poor people in Britain. At this rate Ikea will have to start a new daity wooden furniture product called gi ljotin, which translated means "Guillotine", a wooden piece of furniture with a part that slides down, because history repeats. Marie antionette said, let them eat cake and Theresa May says let them eat shit and die".

Grenfell Tower cladding scandal could cost councils millions after Government says no guarantee of extra funding.

Cladding scandal could cost councils millions after Government says no guarantee of extra funding

dedicated to all who the tories consider scum

 
Has there been any sensible discussion of unofficial sublettings? Unknown numbers of social housing tenants sublet their homes. Are there any estimates as to how widespread this is? Maybe the press and politicians won't touch this because they don't want to be seen to be attacking victims for living there illegally. But one of the things which keeps London running is the Europeans doing minimum wage jobs who share a 2 bed flat between 6 people. You can't close your eyes to it, it's become normal. And there have been mutterings about several hundred deaths in Grenfell Tower. It's very plausible.
 
David Clapson said:
Has there been any sensible discussion of unofficial sublettings? Unknown numbers of social housing tenants sublet their homes. Are there any estimates as to how widespread this is? Maybe the press and politicians won't touch this because they don't want to be seen to be attacking victims for living there illegally. But one of the things which keeps London running is the Europeans doing minimum wage jobs who share a 2 bed flat between 6 people. You can't close your eyes to it, it's become normal. And there have been mutterings about several hundred deaths in Grenfell Tower. It's very plausible.
Click to expand...
It's exceptionally common. "Illegal" sublets might as well be legal because the council will do nothing about them. Agencies in West London will routinely rent a 1 or 2 bed flat and then sublet it to anyone they feel like at an inflated rate, trying to fit 6 people into a 2 bed flat. Nothing happens even if they do blatantly illegal things like change the locks on the actual owners.
 
squirrelp said:
I think it is more to do with maintaining public order and preventing mass demonstrations outside Downing Street before the queen officially invites May to form a government.
Click to expand...

I think you're an idiot. Sorry. People are explaining some reasons why numbers have been given. You keep sticking to conspiracy shit. As if 79 doesn't meet the threshold for rightious anger anyway.
No harm to you. I've not read all thread. But only conspiracy is the same old give the poor / wc the shoddy shit, profit before safety.
 
FridgeMagnet said:
It's exceptionally common. "Illegal" sublets might as well be legal because the council will do nothing about them. Agencies in West London will routinely rent a 1 or 2 bed flat and then sublet it to anyone they feel like at an inflated rate, trying to fit 6 people into a 2 bed flat. Nothing happens even if they do blatantly illegal things like change the locks on the actual owners.
Click to expand...

Have you seen it acknowledged anywhere? I used to have a Polish girlfriend in that situation so I was expecting it to be a big issue...but so far nothing.
 
David Clapson said:
Have you seen it acknowledged anywhere? I used to have a Polish girlfriend in that situation so I was expecting it to be a big issue...but so far nothing.
Click to expand...
There's no traction in it for the authorities or the media. Housing is a massive problem, thanks in large part to a succession of governments who've seen fit to appeal to the property-owning demographic for electoral advantage at the expense of those who don't/can't own property. Enough of them will know that the inevitable consequence of this will be all the usual activities that serve to provide accommodation on a no-questions-asked, no-laws-enforced basis - after all, if a council kick 6 people out of a council flat, they've now got 6 people on the streets, which doesn't look so good.

And "invisible" people living cheek-by-jowl in invisible flats on the 20+th floor of some block on the periphery of Central London...well, where's the story there?
 
But it's got to come out in the end - all those parents will be asking where their kids are. Not just European, but English, Irish, African...the whole bloody world supplies cheap labour to London.
 
David Clapson said:
Have you seen it acknowledged anywhere? I used to have a Polish girlfriend in that situation so I was expecting it to be a big issue...but so far nothing.
Click to expand...
It won't be acknowledged by the councils because that would highlight that they aren't doing their job. It doesn't seem to be the focus of any housing protest group that I know of either, and I could come up with some unflattering reasons why that might be. It's a logical extension of inflated prices, that they produce parasitical capitalism, though.
 
David Clapson said:
Well, could somebody tell John McDonnell? He's not shy. Seriously, somebody should tell him.
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These rates are frequently paid by immigrants. We're not supposed to consider them, or if we ever do, it's just some abstract issue of exploitation that needs to be shut down while of course not allowing immigrants to get a fair rent.
 
Rutita1 said:
...and he would report it based on what information?
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Common knowledge! Fridge Magnet and I aren't the only ones in on this 'secret'. Some people at ITN must have a clue. And there must be scores of former employees of councils or housing charities who know the score and have nothing to lose by speaking out. Then the programme could reasonably say that it's possible that if the tower was like other blocks it could have had hundreds of unregistered occupants.
 
equationgirl said:
If they cared, the recommendations that came from the lakanal tower fire would have been implemented several years ago without questions or delays.
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One would have hoped so, but this is a bit like saying that if criminals cared about getting caught, they wouldn't do the crime.
 
Pretty much nailed it:

This was not simply an accident; as a public inquiry or coroner’s inquest is likely to prove. It was an entirely avoidable tragedy of immense proportions generated by the housing crisis, austerity, deregulation and outsourcing. Grenfell has become a grim monument, a ghastly tomb symbolising the Tory austerity regime; arguably it is bigger than that – a proxy for the unmitigated folly of the neoliberal ideology of deregulated free market orthodoxy favoured by successive governments.
Click to expand...

Grenfell tower: The beginning of the end for the Tories
 
agricola said:
It is, but that is largely because of the circumstances of this disaster. For a start, based on public statements one does get the impression that the TMO doesn't know how many people were actually living in that block on the night of the tragedy. Combine that with the intensity of the fire and its very easy to see why they are only giving estimates of the dead that they know about.
Click to expand...
I think that may have been true a week ago. But it's starting to smell a bit different. The fire services can only go through their clear process, but the council should have pulled records, interviewed survivors, checked with local charities and services... if they haven't done that yet, they really *are* grossly incompetent.
 
FridgeMagnet said:
It's exceptionally common. "Illegal" sublets might as well be legal because the council will do nothing about them. Agencies in West London will routinely rent a 1 or 2 bed flat and then sublet it to anyone they feel like at an inflated rate, trying to fit 6 people into a 2 bed flat. Nothing happens even if they do blatantly illegal things like change the locks on the actual owners.
Click to expand...
Lots of it isn't subletting per se either. Refugees often let friends stay because otherwise where do they go? Social housing is like gold dust, affordable private housing simply doesn't exist.... so if a Syrian family gets a flat, they soon end up with four or five other people on it with them. Loads of the people who come to us are sleeping on sofas and floors (sometimes the overcrowding just becomes too much, sometimes the neighbours complain, or their status changes, so they are referred to us)
 
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