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Grenfell Tower fire in North Kensington - news and discussion

existentialist said:
There's a bit too much of this "so we take this situation as read, NOW look what a fuckup the people at the sharp end of things made" thinking going on - from Brexit, through benefits, to stuff like this. The buck stops a long way back from the fire service's actions on the night, and anyone who is trying to shift the blame there can only be up to no good.
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It's asking why. The fire service advice was wrong on the night, but why was that, and who was to blame for the reasons why it was wrong? Not the fire service.
 
first responders got a shit sandwich but it had been made by others.
If the building hadn't been converted into a firelighter their advice would have worked as it was people died needlessly, fortunately, the fire service doesn't get to practice high rise fires in a shoddily rebuilt death traps so aren't expert in what to do:hmm:.

the Council leadership are responsible for C&K are not a poor council not sure mays at fault the ministers who decided not to act on the warnings about cladding are though.
 
mauvais said:
Just coming back to this now I have a moment more time - he absolutely is critical of the victims, sometimes subtly, sometimes not.






Merely a selection. Lots of explicit criticism that is veiled in something else too, like 'community leaders' and 'activists' - what, are none of those people residents?
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I know its a bit of a tangent, but the way he wrote that £900 pram bit really stuck in my craw - its the whole sneery if you're working class you shouldn't have luxuries thing - and the implication is obviously meant to be that the man was a chancer and the council were overly generous. Whereas maybe his family had a pram like that which had been lost in the fire (those massive old fashioned and hugely expensive silver cross prams are really popular in some specific communities round here). Maybe having something you can be confident is safe and clean and smart for transporting your kid around, or sitting outside with them, or that is not just used as a pram but as cot, playpen, car seat, etc might seem really important and be a totally rational ask when you've just been burnt out of your house and are in temporary accommodation. Maybe the child (or one of the parents) had additional needs and needed a certain style of pram. A totally fair enough ask.
 
crossthebreeze said:
I know its a bit of a tangent, but the way he wrote that £900 pram bit really stuck in my craw - its the whole sneery if you're working class you shouldn't have luxuries thing - and the implication is obviously meant to be that the man was a chancer and the council were overly generous. Whereas maybe his family had a pram like that which had been lost in the fire (those massive old fashioned and hugely expensive silver cross prams are really popular in some specific communities round here). Maybe having something you can be confident is safe and clean and smart for transporting your kid around, or sitting outside with them, or that is not just used as a pram but as cot, playpen, car seat, etc might seem really important and be a totally rational ask when you've just been burnt out of your house and are in temporary accommodation. Maybe the child (or one of the parents) had additional needs and needed a certain style of pram. A totally fair enough ask.
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I also think that if you have - as seems pretty evident - fucked up to the point that someone's entire life, if not their loved ones, has gone up in smoke, you're pretty much wide open to whatever they might choose to claim was lost. If you don't like the idea of your tenants asking for things you suspect they didn't have already, don't engineer their homes in such a way as to ensure the total destruction of everything they have.
 
exactly
poor sod had lost friends and possibly family and knew "the council" had been responsible for why the flats went up like a tinderbox.
expecting gratitude a bit much when it was your fault the person was living in a hotel.
 
Plumdaff said:
It's asking why. The fire service advice was wrong on the night, but why was that, and who was to blame for the reasons why it was wrong? Not the fire service.
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it was the wrong advice for the right reasons. when i lived in a tower block we got new doors which we were told would last a certain amount of time in a fire, and being as there was a fire station down the end of the road i was confident of a swift response. if things had been as they should then the advice was at the time good: and of course no one had bothered to let the fire service know the place was rigged to go up like a roman candle.
 
Pulling together the various strings of this is not easy.

At the heart of it we have a catastrophic construction project where Building Regs have been ignored and no one in the chain has taken responsibility. It was mentioned up thread that projects don't necessarily have to comply with Building Regs if a suitable justification has been given. Clearly not the case, which brings us onto the second point.

What on earth has been going on in the regulation of the construction sector. Everyone knew fire regs were weak years and years ago, they were far to open to interpretation and it fell upon the manufacturers (who's sole aim is to flog product) to interpret these guidelines. Everyone knew this and especially the government did and we know that twat Barwell sat on the problem for a couple of years as did his predecessors.

Thirdly we have the roll of the local authority both before and after the disaster. Fourthly there is the wider role of the government and the engineered housing crisis which led to poor people being stacked on top of each with scant regard to any basic level of safety or security. A tower block (full of people who are the victims of our terrible housing system) surrounded by hundreds of empty, million pound plus properties.

Lastly is the roll of the fire service and was the advice correct? To my mind this is the least troubling of all of the above. I remember commenting on this thread at the time about all the praise the government were heaping onto the first responders immediately after the event, even to the point of virtually ignoring those who had been killed or lost everything. Now, they would have us believe, the fire service were useless and racists to boot - it beggars belief really. The fact that the police seem to have opened an investigation against the fire service before any of the criminally negligent persons involved in the construction project says it all really.

I think its vitally important that with everything else that was going on we should never forget that this was a disaster primarily created by crooks in the construction companies and the cunts involved should not be allowed to just slink away.
 
Teaboy said:
I think its vitally important that with everything else that was going on we should never forget that this was a disaster primarily created by crooks in the construction companies and the cunts involved should not be allowed to just slink away.
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I know quoting yourself is bad form but I just wanted to expand on this.

My fear is that the government will try and protect the construction industry for fear of the industry just pointing out the piss poor regulatory environment which of course puts the government square in the frame.

Keeping the pressure on the industry will ultimately force the government's hand. That is my hope.
 
Over-focus on the role of the firefighters can distract from the more important question about regulation in the construction industry. But so can over-focus on this one particular council. That's not to say that they should be excused of the responsibilities they had to properly manage the building in use, but as far as the design and construction of the refurb is concerned, making sure that was done properly was down to the designers, installers and the regulations that apply to them. It's easy to say that the situation was caused by cost-cutting, and it's not that that is irrelevant, but if a cost cutting measure is proposed that compromises fire safety then there should be a system that makes sure that such a measure is simply not allowed. If it was cost reasons that lead to the final cladding spec being chosen (and it's not entirely clear at this point if it was) the principal failure is still in the fact that the spec was allowed at all.

The reality is that you also see poor, and unsafe, construction standards in high-end and private housing projects. The dodgy installation stuff gets hidden behind the finish whether the finish is plasterboard or marble. Pressures to drive down cost are there in all building projects, and in the end those pressures are inevitable. There needs to be a strong regulatory system to provide protection from them and the biggest lesson from Grenfell as far as I can see is that this system is not there.
 
Teaboy said:
...Now, they would have us believe, the fire service were useless and racists to boot - it beggars belief really...
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Not really unfortunately. The modus operandi of those within positions of power if it looks like they may be held accountable somewhere down the road is to cast around for scapegoats and then smear, smear, smear.
 
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I've believed the stay put advice was wrong since the results of the Lakanal enquiry but it's not a straightforward thing to change it. The change to 'just get the fuck out if you can' only happened when it was clear large numbers of people were going to die. It's not really good advice for everyone on it's own. It nly works for relatively fit and mobile people and only with some sort of training and information on how best to make your way through a burning building.
 
Pickman's model said:
it was the wrong advice for the right reasons. when i lived in a tower block we got new doors which we were told would last a certain amount of time in a fire, and being as there was a fire station down the end of the road i was confident of a swift response. if things had been as they should then the advice was at the time good: and of course no one had bothered to let the fire service know the place was rigged to go up like a roman candle.
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One of the firefighters who had been in and out of Grenfell on the night was interviewed on radio 4 last week. They kept asking him if he regretted the stay put order. After making it clear that he wasn't personally responsible, he really struggled to find the right way to answer, eventually settling on "fire does not spread like that" and when pushed "in my XX years of experience, fire does not spread like that".

(Can't remember the exact number of years, it was a lot, 20 or 30).

Pretty obvious what he meant.
 
Much as I agree with others that whatever errors, or not, on the FB's part are very much small beer compared to the somewhat larger problem of flammable building materials and a non-existant testing and regulation environment, I think it's worth looking at whether there is a problem with the training of senior fire officers with regards to decision making and command.

In both this incident and the Manchester bombing the FB's were significantly behind what was happening - they had a plan in both cases, and no plan is perfect and it never survives contact with reality, so don't blame them for the plan not working - the problem is that in both cases there was a real time lag between it becoming apparent that the existing plan wasn't working and anyone making a decision that a new plan was required.

That's not slagging off firefighters, it's wondering if two very different incidents that showed similar problems with regards to decision making at a senior level might have a basis in how those senior officers are trained.
 
fucthest8 said:
One of the firefighters who had been in and out of Grenfell on the night was interviewed on radio 4 last week. They kept asking him if he regretted the stay put order. After making it clear that he wasn't personally responsible, he really struggled to find the right way to answer, eventually settling on "fire does not spread like that" and when pushed "in my XX years of experience, fire does not spread like that".

(Can't remember the exact number of years, it was a lot, 20 or 30).

Pretty obvious what he meant.
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Yeah, I heard this too. I think the interviewer might have referenced O'Hagan too actually, but I'm not sure.
 
mauvais said:
Yeah, I heard this too. I think the interviewer might have referenced O'Hagan too actually, but I'm not sure.
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That was another of the many things that annoyed me about O’Hagan - what felt like an extended characterisation of the FB’s reaction as wrong. I mean we all know it was wrong in hindsight but it was right in theory and criticism would only be valid based on some failure to identify the change in circumstances from normal and/or failure to communicate it in time, neither of which I felt he backed up.
 
mauvais said:
Just coming back to this now I have a moment more time - he absolutely is critical of the victims, sometimes subtly, sometimes not.






Merely a selection. Lots of explicit criticism that is veiled in something else too, like 'community leaders' and 'activists' - what, are none of those people residents?
Click to expand...
If people didn't associate the person sat across from them with the council, why didn't they fucking say they were from the council?
 
I 'regret' my Grenfell reaction - May

"What I did not do on that first visit was meet the residents and survivors who had escaped the blaze.
"But the residents of Grenfell Tower needed to know that those in power recognised and understood their despair.
"And I will always regret that by not meeting them that day, it seemed as though I didn't care."


i wonder if it was the Queen who pointed this shit out to her
 
gosub said:
I 'regret' my Grenfell reaction - May

"What I did not do on that first visit was meet the residents and survivors who had escaped the blaze.
"But the residents of Grenfell Tower needed to know that those in power recognised and understood their despair.
"And I will always regret that by not meeting them that day, it seemed as though I didn't care."


i wonder if it was the Queen who pointed this shit out to her
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the queen learned her lesson
in september '97
 
taffboy gwyrdd said:
Good doc by sonya poulton. Deserves many views.

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She repeats as fact the theory that 'political correctness' was responsible for the failures in dealing with gangs sexually exploiting children, as opposed to a combination of corruption and sheer disregard which there seems to be more evidence for.

Pretty good apart from that though.
 
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