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Grenfell Tower fire in North Kensington - news and discussion

Bernie Gunther said:
Interesting development reported by BBC just now.

Perhaps whoever is running things in No 10 right now have, belatedly, realised that the utter inability of KCBC to provide help to its citizens is making austerity look bad.



Grenfell Tower fire: Government staff sent into Kensington and Chelsea council - BBC News
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There was someone on one of the news channels earlier saying they hadn't seen anyone from K&C council on the ground, but a number of employees from Westminster council had been helping.

WFT is wrong with K&C?
 
Grenfell Tower fire: May under pressure after 'angry exchanges' in No 10 – live updates

Eve Allison, a Conservative who sits on Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council, said the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower should have looked at the inside as well as the outside of the block.

“It is on our watch, it’s our responsibility, we do have a duty of care to all our residents and whatever findings and failings come out, they have to come out soon because all the community, the victims, the families, people need answers,” she told BBC Breakfast.

“All too often we’re a little bit too concerned with how the immediate streetscape looks, how a building fits into other buildings, does it detract from the immediate streetscape.”

“I was not involved with the actual planning of the recent refurbishment....from what I’m hearing, it would have been ideal if part of the refurbishment package had looked at actually trying to gentrify inside, not just outside. “
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Perhaps not quite the right choice of phrase at the end there?
 
So the number of people in the building... Some guesstimates based on available figures. Feel free to correct me!

120 total flats over 20 floors*

Total of 80 two bedroom flats. (4 two bedroom flats on each floor.)
Total of 40 one bedroom flats. (2 two bedroom flats on each floor.)

Minimum total inhabitants presuming all flats occupied:

80 x 2 people = 160 people in two bed flats.
40 x 1 person = 40 people in one bed flats.
= 200 people in Grenfell Tower

A higher total of inhabitants based on all flats occupied with two adults, two children in two bed flats, and two adults in one bed flats .

80 x 4 people = 320 people in two bed flats.
40 x 2 people = 80 people in one bed flats.
= 400 people in Grenfell Tower.

An even higher estimate of inhabitants based on all 2 bed flats having 6 people in them and one bed flats having 3 people in them.

80 x 6 people = 480 people in two bed flats.
40 x 3 people = 120 people in one bed flats.
= 600 people in Grenfell Tower.

Of course it's known that *some* two bed flats had more than 4 people and *some* one bed flats had more than 2 people in them, but reports also show there are instances of just one person in a one bed flat and two people in a two bed flat. That being the case it means that you'd need incrementally more people in those other flats to push the 400 total higher.

So I'd estimate somewhere between 400 and 600 people living there.

The fact it was 1am suggests many might have been at home in bed but there's probably some +/- variation due to work/social visits/Ramadan.

The death toll is officially 58.
There's a reported 72 people taken to hospital.
We know some people escaped unharmed, but not how many.
Total official dead and injured = 130 people.

The best way of finding out numbers is for the council to say how many people they are having to re-house. That should be easy to assertion and would give a better way of looking how many are dead based on above guesswork.



*BBC reports 127 flats from floors 3 to 24 and with one or more on floor 2 which is mixed use floor. Other reports state only 120.
 
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This smells very bad.

The council responsible for Grenfell Tower, where at least 58 people are now thought to have lost their lives after Wednesday's horrific fire, has been accused of carrying out “unacceptable” financial practises after it emerged the borough had stockpiled £274m of usable reserves following years of chronic underspending.
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(my emphasis)

  • Where £5k would have bought a less flammable cladding, £200k a sprinkler system, meaning these people would not be dead or homeless.
  • Where the survivors have received help only from overstretched emergency services, volunteers and charities and the council has been invisible on the ground.

So what was that nice fat pot of money earmarked for one asks?

... claims by Labour Councillor Robert Atkinson the council was “bribing the electorate with its own money” after it “systematically and deliberately created underspends”.

“Our suspicion, based on past experience, remains that this council will bring in and hoard the people’s money in non election years (such as this) only to give it back as a pre-election bribe immediately before a council election – such as next year,” he said in a speech after 2017’s budget was announced.

“We think this council’s long standing practises of, every year, running huge underspends in its revenue budgets which it then transfers into Capital reserves is wrong, and, given the damage to services that has resulted over many years from the squeezing of revenue budgets it is not to put too fine a point on it – wicked.”
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Council attacked for stockpiling £274m despite Grenfell Tower residents' calls for fire safety improvements
 
Bernie Gunther said:
This smells very bad.

(my emphasis)

  • Where £5k would have bought a less flammable cladding, £200k a sprinkler system, meaning these people would not be dead or homeless.
  • Where the survivors have received help only from overstretched emergency services, volunteers and charities and the council has been invisible on the ground.

So what was that nice fat pot of money earmarked for one asks?



Council attacked for stockpiling £274m despite Grenfell Tower residents' calls for fire safety improvements
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This tweet is making the same point:

 
To add to Barking_Mad 's numbers, I know the housing situation is very different in London from where i live (where there is a lot of underoccupation as well as a lot of overoccupation in social housing because of the housing stock available and historic reasons). But surely there would be at least some underoccupation (pensioners whose kids have moved out, private leaseholders who can afford the mortgage and service charge) which would bring the total down a bit, even if flats were more likely to be fully or over occupied - though a few cases of extreme overoccupation or big iftar dinner parties might cancel that out i suppose.
 
teqniq said:
No really please no need to apologise. Not everybody will continue reading where they left off last night so it definitely need to be reposted. :) The more people that are made aware of what they have done the better, it's fucking disgusting imo.
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Indeed - I've really been trying to keep up with all the developments but this is naturally moving so fast that if you're away for a few hours you can come back to 10/15 pages of (often quite dense) reading, which is still growing as you try to catch up!

As frustrating as reposts can be sometimes, I think in this instance it's good to have 'recaps' or reposts.
 
free spirit said:
Been talking to my dad about this this afternoon (he's a professor of combustion engineering / fire engineering, ran one of the only fire engineering courses in the country for several decades).

It seems that the list of regulatory failures that led to this are quite a bit longer and go back further than I'd thought.

Stuff like the fact that the advice that people in tall buildings should stay in their flats, and shouldn't use the lifts to escape has been under review for something like 15 years without that review ever being concluded.

And he reckons that the building regs requirements for the fire rating of these cladding panels / insulation for tall buildings was reduced in the building regs revision in 2010 when it changed from a previous BS standard to a EN BS standard, but you'd have to actually have copies of each document to know this. The new regs specifically don't have any requirement for smoke / soot emissions or to prevent molten burning material from dripping and spreading the fire that way. Which is why the smoke was so bad, and molten burning material can be seen falling from the cladding.

Amongst other things that he's currently writing up a report on.

Says he's been making these points at conferences etc for years and being ignored.
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Appreciate a link to that report if your allowed to share it when it's done.
 
bi0boy said:
Of the 149 listed as missing I counted at least 37 that are also listed as being duplicates in the comments column. I wouldn't regard that list as being remotely accurate.
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Yeah, I just used Excel and "repeat" or "repeated" in the editable column suggests 37 duplicates. Might be more with different spellings of the same name that have not been spotted.

I might have a better look at it later. The guy needs to A to Z his list by surname!
 
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