It's already political. You cage the poorest in towerblocks and then abandon them economically. These are decisions made by politicians who hate the working class.
Grenfell Tower fire in North Kensington - news and discussion
- Thread starter JTG
- Start date
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
If one was cynical I guess one might consider that technically all those hundreds - HUNDREDS - of people just burned out of their homes are no longer really residents, and so not the priority of KCTMO
agricola
a genuine importer of owls
You can tell how much of this is likely to be laid at their door by the way that Guido is covering today's news - which is of course dominated by the shock finding that Clement Attlee got more of the vote and more seats than Corbyn.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
investigative journalism at its finest
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
The London fire commissioner said she had seen loads of fires in tower blocks over her 29 years in the job, which were basically contained, and couldn't understand how this one spread from floors 2 to 24 in just 30 minutes.
Something clearly was wrong with this particular block, and it seems to keep coming back to this bloody cladding that was added last year.
Something clearly was wrong with this particular block, and it seems to keep coming back to this bloody cladding that was added last year.
editor
hiraethified
Cab you copy and paste the contents?
Sorry but I don't think that's what happened. The building has been upgraded in several respects including increasing the number of flats by remodeling the lower floors. The facade system was a combination of increasing the thermal performance (lower bills for residents) and improving the look of the building which should benefit all. I don't believe they would just spend 10 million to tart it up a bit there has been more work done on it then that.
Whether the residents were consulted in the process I don't know but it would be unusual if they were not. I've personally been to quite a few resident liaison meetings for similar projects where the plans are on show and the feedback from residents is sought.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Fire expert: Grenfell Tower tragedy 'entirely predictable'
14 JUNE, 2017 BY WILL HURST
Ministers failed to act on the clear lessons of the 2009 Lakanal House fire according to high-rise fire safety expert Sam Webb
The tragic fire at Grenfell Tower could and should have been prevented thanks to the lessons of a similar disaster in the capital eight years’ ago, a leading fire expert has told the AJ.
Sam Webb, a retired architect who investigated the fatal 2009 Lakanal House fire in Southwark and acted as an expert witness to the families affected at the inquest, said that Lakanal House also featured cladding which caught fire (pictured below).
That fire claimed six lives including three children and was previously the UK’s worst fire in a postwar block of flats.
Webb, who sits on the Parliamentary All Party Fire & Rescue Group and also investigated the infamous 1968 Ronan Point tower collapse, said that cladding panels underneath windows at Lakanal House had caught fire within four-and-a-half minutes.
Of Grenfell Tower, he said: ‘This tragedy was entirely predictable, sadly.
‘What we saw at Lakanal House should have been enough to make people think about what was going on with the outside of our buildings in terms of cladding.’
Webb also questioned why the government had not updated Part B of the Building Regulations covering fire risk in tall buildings and why sprinkler systems had been made mandatory in new build towers but not in refurbished ones.
‘We [the All Party Group] have been trying to get ministers to make sure we have sprinkler systems on refurbished as well as new towers but this has fallen on deaf ears,’ he said. ‘We provide people with water in their homes, why can’t we provide sprinkler systems – it’s not rocket science.
‘Ron Dobson, the then chief fire officer of the London Fire Brigade, concluded at the end of the Lakanal House inquest that these would have saved those who died.
Last autumn, then housing minister Gavin Barwell - who lost his seat at the general election and was this week appointed as Theresa May’s new chief of staff - announced a review into Part B of the Building Regulations 2010.
However, the review has not yet begun and in March, a spokesperson for the DCLG said the review would be undertaken ‘in due course’.
In 2009, a BBC London investigation found that hundreds of tower blocks across London had not been properly assessed for fire safety.
Using FOI, the investigation found that councils had failed to fire check at least 253 social housing high-rises – something that constitutes a criminal offence.
Lambeth Council has only carried out risk assessments on two of its 112 tower blocks while Southwark, the local authority in charge of Lakanal House, where six people died in a fire that year, refused to answer the FOI request.
Requests sent to 32 boroughs showed at least eight councils had failed to make proper checks.
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
This seems to be the only comment so far:
"Hannah Mansell, chair of the Passive Fire Protection Forum, trustee of the Children’s Burns Trust and spokesperson for the BWF’s Fire Door Safety Week campaign
We have a right to be very angry at the news about Grenfell Tower. I regularly sit in meetings with fire safety professionals, and their fury and frustration at the inaction of local councils and social landlords is palpable.
We have been warning about the risks of a fire like this for years. ‘What we need to get people to take notice is a huge fire in a tower block’ they say. Well, here it is.
’There’s an endemic fire safety problem in this type of housing stock’
There is an endemic fire safety problem in this type of housing stock. I have walked around tower blocks documenting and filming the fire safety breaches. I’ve seen flats without fire doors, no emergency lighting or signage on fire doors and escape routes, broken fire rated glass, wedged-open fire doors, poor fire stopping around service hatches that breach compartmentation, no smoke seals in fire doors, rubbish and combustible material left in the common areas, and no information displayed on the specific fire plan of the building.
But that information appears to fall on deaf ears. Action must be taken now to address these issues."
Yuwipi Woman
Whack-A-Mole Queen
If one was cynical I guess one might consider that technically all those hundreds - HUNDREDS - of people just burned out of their homes are no longer really residents, and so not the priority of KCTMO
If they had been a priority, you'd think they'd would have provided housing for their residents that wasn't a deathtrap.
gawkrodger
Well-Known Member
Ministers failed to act on the clear lessons of the 2009 Lakanal House fire according to high-rise fire safety expert Sam Webb
The tragic fire at Grenfell Tower could and should have been prevented thanks to the lessons of a similar disaster in the capital eight years’ ago, a leading fire expert has told the AJ.
Sam Webb, a retired architect who investigated the fatal 2009 Lakanal House fire in Southwark and acted as an expert witness to the families affected at the inquest, said that Lakanal House also featured cladding which caught fire (pictured below).
That fire claimed six lives including three children and was previously the UK’s worst fire in a postwar block of flats.
Webb, who sits on the Parliamentary All Party Fire & Rescue Group and also investigated the infamous 1968 Ronan Point tower collapse, said that cladding panels underneath windows at Lakanal House had caught fire within four-and-a-half minutes.
Of Grenfell Tower, he said: ‘This tragedy was entirely predictable, sadly.
‘What we saw at Lakanal House should have been enough to make people think about what was going on with the outside of our buildings in terms of cladding.’
Webb also questioned why the government had not updated Part B of the Building Regulations covering fire risk in tall buildings and why sprinkler systems had been made mandatory in new build towers but not in refurbished ones.
Ministers failed to act on the clear lessons of the 2009 Lakanal House fire according to high-rise fire safety expert Sam Webb
The tragic fire at Grenfell Tower could and should have been prevented thanks to the lessons of a similar disaster in the capital eight years’ ago, a leading fire expert has told the AJ.
Sam Webb, a retired architect who investigated the fatal 2009 Lakanal House fire in Southwark and acted as an expert witness to the families affected at the inquest, said that Lakanal House also featured cladding which caught fire (pictured below).
That fire claimed six lives including three children and was previously the UK’s worst fire in a postwar block of flats.
Webb, who sits on the Parliamentary All Party Fire & Rescue Group and also investigated the infamous 1968 Ronan Point tower collapse, said that cladding panels underneath windows at Lakanal House had caught fire within four-and-a-half minutes.
Of Grenfell Tower, he said: ‘This tragedy was entirely predictable, sadly.
‘What we saw at Lakanal House should have been enough to make people think about what was going on with the outside of our buildings in terms of cladding.’
Webb also questioned why the government had not updated Part B of the Building Regulations covering fire risk in tall buildings and why sprinkler systems had been made mandatory in new build towers but not in refurbished ones.
Lakanal House fire
zoom inzoom out
‘We [the All Party Group] have been trying to get ministers to make sure we have sprinkler systems on refurbished as well as new towers but this has fallen on deaf ears,’ he said. ‘We provide people with water in their homes, why can’t we provide sprinkler systems – it’s not rocket science.
‘Ron Dobson, the then chief fire officer of the London Fire Brigade, concluded at the end of the Lakanal House inquest that these would have saved those who died.
Last autumn, then housing minister Gavin Barwell - who lost his seat at the general election and was this week appointed as Theresa May’s new chief of staff - announced a review into Part B of the Building Regulations 2010.
However, the review has not yet begun and in March, a spokesperson for the DCLG said the review would be undertaken ‘in due course’.
In 2009, a BBC London investigation found that hundreds of tower blocks across London had not been properly assessed for fire safety.
Using FOI, the investigation found that councils had failed to fire check at least 253 social housing high-rises – something that constitutes a criminal offence.
Lambeth Council has only carried out risk assessments on two of its 112 tower blocks while Southwark, the local authority in charge of Lakanal House, where six people died in a fire that year, refused to answer the FOI request.
Requests sent to 32 boroughs showed at least eight councils had failed to make proper checks.
Comments
Hannah Mansell, chair of the Passive Fire Protection Forum, trustee of the Children’s Burns Trust and spokesperson for the BWF’s Fire Door Safety Week campaign
We have a right to be very angry at the news about Grenfell Tower. I regularly sit in meetings with fire safety professionals, and their fury and frustration at the inaction of local councils and social landlords is palpable.
We have been warning about the risks of a fire like this for years. ‘What we need to get people to take notice is a huge fire in a tower block’ they say. Well, here it is.
’There’s an endemic fire safety problem in this type of housing stock’
There is an endemic fire safety problem in this type of housing stock. I have walked around tower blocks documenting and filming the fire safety breaches. I’ve seen flats without fire doors, no emergency lighting or signage on fire doors and escape routes, broken fire rated glass, wedged-open fire doors, poor fire stopping around service hatches that breach compartmentation, no smoke seals in fire doors, rubbish and combustible material left in the common areas, and no information displayed on the specific fire plan of the building.
But that information appears to fall on deaf ears. Action must be taken now to address these issues.
HoratioCuthbert
Deep seated inconsequence
It obviously says this in Indy article, but this more from residents point of view. I've seen another resident on the tv that was pretty irate about it too.
"The tower block had been fitted with external plastic cladding last year costing £10million. Residents said the panels were fitted to make the block more aesthetically pleasing for residents of luxury developments nearby, while lifts in neighbouring blocks had been left broken for years despite costing approximately £60,000 to repair."
Council blamed over tower blaze deaths
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Great posts by the way teaboy.
teqniq
DisMembered
This is exactly what I've seen actually happened from people on Twitter.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
Fucking hell, this is going to be massive. Again, sorry, both should and shouldn't be thinking things like that today. Fucking hell.
These are slightly different issues. You can't upgrade the insulation of a block of flats without putting a new skin on the building. Unless of course you do it inside and make everyone's rooms smaller which is unpopular.
Clearly the on-going maintenance is going to be a massive issue but there are all sorts of grants available from the government, the mayor and the energy providers for projects which include insulating a building. Councils and social housing providers are obliged to have a strategy to improve all of their housing stock. Its obviously easier for them to do blocks of flats and do 40 odd homes in one hit then individual houses.
So in short the money would have come from a different pot then the maintenance which is why the residents have ended up with a new cladding system they didn't see the benefit of and lifts that don't work.
As butchers suggests a page or so back there are so many different strands to this going on. So many possible factors that have possibly caused or at least contributed to this disaster. I get the feeling this could be one of those watershed moments. Not that that is much use to the poor souls who lived there.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
The kindness needs to be available, but not imposed.
At this stage, what people need is to be able to debrief - talk through what happened, what's going on for them, etc. The proper interventions don't need to happen for a few months, by which time it will be clearer whose struggling with post-traumatic psychological injury ("PTSD").
scifisam
feck! arse! girls! drink!
If one was cynical I guess one might consider that technically all those hundreds - HUNDREDS - of people just burned out of their homes are no longer really residents, and so not the priority of KCTMO
Nah, they are still residents. Well, the living ones are.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
This feels more visceral and immediate - like the poll tax. This is coming down on everyone. How can london live like this any longer?
HoratioCuthbert
Deep seated inconsequence
Fair dos I was more just sharing because they didn't seem to think it was to their benefit and were complaining that they hadn't been respected and listened to when carrying out the project.
And I hadn't read that when I posted
EastEnder
Brixton Barnacle
That must be fucking awful - it's one thing to see the comparatively sanitised reporting on the telly, but to actually see & hear people screaming for their lives as the fire reaches them...
Makes me shudder just to imagine it...
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
This warms the cockles of my heart.
eoin_k
Lawyer's fees, beetroot and music
An interviewee on Radio 4 just described a separate incident in Hammersmith - a neighbouring Tory-run borough that has a shared administration with Kensington and another local authority. I didn't follow the full story, but it involved a fire report that identified a certain design of window as a hazard not being published. It was only released through a Freedom of Information request. The interviewee couldn't see any legitimate reason for not making this information more widely available.
This is what a bonfire of red tape looks like.
This is what a bonfire of red tape looks like.
Johnny Doe
Well-Known Member
Tri-borough shared services - Wikipedia
Looks like they fucked it up too Westminster and RBKC serve notice on Tri-borough
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