Grenfell Tower fire in North Kensington - news and discussion

[Treacle Toes]

 

[mauvais]

Following on from my earlier post, to provide some proper detail, this is from the Shirley Towers fire in 2010, and the report and coroner's recommendation letter in 2013:

The IC assuming that Flat 72 was on the seventh floor and planning to set up the Bridgehead on the fifth floor instead of the seventh floor. In fact, by mistake and contrary to the instructions of the IC who gave instructions for the Bridgehead to be positioned on the fifth floor, the Bridgehead was set up correctly on the seventh floor but throughout the incident most personnel were confused about the actual floor they were on.

...

It is recommended that there should be an obligation to:
d) provide signage to indicate floor levels both in stairwells and lift lobbies in high
rise premises, to assist the emergency services;
e) ensure that signage indicating flat numbers and emergency exits in high rise
premises are placed at a low level to increase visibility in smoke conditions.

This is from a Grenfell firefighter account:

The smoke grew thicker with each floor we went up. No proper floor numbers on the stairwells after about the 5th floor made it hard to know where you were. Someone before us had tried to write them on the wall with chinagraph pencil but this didn't last long. The dirty smoke was covering the walls with a film of blackness.

This is a link I posted earlier: CLG rejects fire safety advice | News | Inside Housing

Peter Holland, chief fire and rescue advisor to the Communities and Local Government department ...
also said there will be no requirements for specific signage to be placed in tower blocks. The government believes current regulations place ‘responsibility for compliance where it belongs - with employers and building owners’, he added.

Can't even put fucking numbers in a stairwell FFS, so what chance a £200k sprinkler system.

 

[brogdale]

There is no job title for him in the article. It says he is 56 and spent a week volunteering

Yeah, apologies.
Either I got confused with the telegraph version of the same story, or the Indy piece has subsequently been edited.
Either way, here's an overview of his work:-

But the father of two, a financial consultant whose firm is employed by Kensington and Chelsea Council, was at the council offices when despair turned into angry protests on Friday...
Mr Outram, from Stafford, works in debt management and is a former civil servant.
He was head of income collection at Islington Council before setting up his own company, Westgem Consultancy, which provides debt recovery advice and interim management to public and private sector clients.

 

[Treacle Toes]

Why are the tube stations still closed?

 

[sealion]

Apols if this has already been posted up thread.
Unite donates to Grenfell fund and provides legal support for residents seeking justice

 

[ddraig]

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

How much would installing sprinklers in every multi storey public sector building in the country cost ?

Alex

a tiny drop in the ocean of trident renewal
a bit of the money paid to pay off senior exec staff when they leave/are sidelined
the fucking sandwich budget of a few large councils
the hotel bill for staff going on completely pointless conferences
need anymore?

 

[Manter]

Yeah, apologies.
Either I got confused with the telegraph version of the same story, or the Indy piece has subsequently been edited.
Either way, here's an overview of his work:-

​

Ooh, blimey. Yeah. See what you mean

 

[killer b]

Ooh, blimey. Yeah. See what you mean

Does seem a bit sus that the only guy to get roughed up was the debt collector.

Maybe someone recognised him?

 

[brogdale]

Does seem a bit sus that the only guy to get roughed up was the debt collector.

Maybe someone recognised him?

yeah, if so, he was lucky to get away with being "...pushed to the ground and water poured over him.."

 

[Manter]

Does seem a bit sus that the only guy to get roughed up was the debt collector.

Maybe someone recognised him?

The independent article says he looks like the head of KCTMO (or something! Can't remeber) And there is a pic of him misidentified on the internet

But yeah. Interesting

 

[mojo pixy]

"mad as a box of frogs"

I've always thought boxed frogs get a hard time. I mean, I'd be pretty pissed off if I was a frog stuck in a box, and I reckon you would be too.

I once actually carried a box of frogs, from an old pond we were digging up and filling in, to a nearby river.

Mad.

 

[Celyn]

Does seem a bit sus that the only guy to get roughed up was the debt collector.

Maybe someone recognised him?

 

[Treacle Toes]

Lbc reporting this morning that none of the refurbishment work was ever officially approved/signed off. :'(

 

[existentialist]

Lbc reporting this morning that none of the refurbishment work was ever officially approved/signed off. :'(

I bet it was paid for, though...

 

[Barking_Mad]

LBC report here

EXCLUSIVE: Grenfell Tower Refurbishment Was Not Approved - LBC

Although as pointed out on Twitter, this might not be correct?

 

[brogdale]

LBC report here

EXCLUSIVE: Grenfell Tower Refurbishment Was Not Approved - LBC

Although as pointed out on Twitter, this might not be correct?

"The TMO was responsible for the works and therefore the council may well say it is responsible for making sure the refurbishment works complied with building control. This could get very messy."

Contender for under-statement of the year award.

 

[nuffsaid]

They've got grief tourists to deal with now - Grenfell locals have a stern warning for visitors taking sick selfies with the tower

 

[Barking_Mad]

Over 170 years after Engels, Britain is still a country that murders its poor | Aditya Chakrabortty

 

[Dogsauce]

I'm really fucking baffled by this one. They were never be missing- the Syria solidarity campaign knew where they were the whole time. Their lawyers knew, their caseworker knew. They were at an event I was at on Saturday.

So how monumentally fucked is the process that they were 'missing'?

It's just rank incompetence.

Did all their neighbours know they were OK? They were probably reported as known to have lived in the block and put on a list of potentially missing people, and given there were hundreds of people on that list from various sources it would be a big job to rule them out. They're probably working on such vague stuff as 'there was a Syrian family living on my mate's floor, don't know the flat number'. People will be on the list multiple times, sometimes by name, sometimes by description, and they'll be very cautious in eliminating potential missing people from the list. This sort of dot-joining stuff is also why it takes a long time to come out with expected casualty figures.

Exagerating a story like this also makes good clickbait, so don't expect such tales to perfectly match the facts, especially with the Independent.

 

[not-bono-ever]

They've got grief tourists to deal with now - Grenfell locals have a stern warning for visitors taking sick selfies with the tower

that is pretty shit

 

[D'wards]

Had a thought - if the survivors are given a load of cash from the various charity things etc, then they would be ineligible for benefits. They'd have to pay their own rent, and they'd be fools to stay in the area paying those prices.

 

[8den]

Footage shot by LFB members as the came over the westway seeing the fire the first time.


Warning it's pretty harrowing

 

[DotCommunist]

Footage shot by LFB members as the came over the westway seeing the fire the first time.


Warning it's pretty harrowing

this was posted yesterday, when its trained pros gobsmacked and cursing in disbelief then you know the situation is fucked.

 

[BigTom]

Had a thought - if the survivors are given a load of cash from the various charity things etc, then they would be ineligible for benefits. They'd have to pay their own rent, and they'd be fools to stay in the area paying those prices.

iirc £6,000 in savings and benefits starts to taper off at that point (assuming you are on income based rather than contributions based) - that was for JSA a few years ago, probably different for Universal Credit.
In any case, if they receive the cash and spend it it won't deny them benefits. I suppose it might be counted as income and have their benefits reduced/stopped for a month but I don't think it'd make them ineligible - definitely something for anyone who is claiming to watch out for though.

 

[Wilf]

that is pretty shit

I'm amazed how restrained the residents have been over this. In fact I'm amazed how restrained they've been more generally. The most the Mail and others could rant about was that a few tried to push their way up the stairs at the council offices demo. I'm equally amazed how together they've been when doing interviews. In their position I'd have been an incoherent wreck, unable to get two words out without screaming.

 

[LDC]

iirc £6,000 in savings and benefits starts to taper off at that point...

Wonder if that's why that initial sum the government announced was £5,500 - so below that. I did think it was an odd amount.

 

[free spirit]

Yeah just to expand on that. There have been fires with similar cladding which have been nowhere near as catastrophic. Also this fire was extraordinary, all the floors were on fire at the same time and with extreme ferocity. I have said all along that I suspect something else was happening in addition, something was fueling this fire. Bearing in mind what these panels are made of the fire would have had to be sustained by something as it may its way into the building so quickly. The insulation is probably going to be a culprit as is the lack of fire stopping. Regardless of what happened with the cladding the residents should have had an hour to escape this building at the least, it appears they didn't even have minutes.

I don't know more than anyone else about how this fire spread so quickly and so devastatingly.

I thought I'd go back to basics and did my own fire test on some slightly less fire rated celotex that I had kicking around, and have now changed my opinion on it quite a bit.

With a blow torch on it it did burn quite a lot, with thick black smoke, but within a few seconds of the blowtorch being removed the flames went out as the surface of the insulation charred and formed a seal.

So I'd agree with you that something else is likely to have been happening to provide the fuel to have sustained the fire which caused the cladding to continue burning instead of self extinguishing. Unless the reflective innerface of the external cladding was enough to retain enough heat to keep the insulation fire going or something.

The fire rating of the insulation for that height building was only for use with a fully fire proof gyproc outer skin (IIRC), it wasn't rated with this cladding system, so could be that it's the combination of the 2 systems at fault. Maybe either would be ok without the other, but not together.

I'm also suspicious of the fact they've apparently placed all the combi boilers on the extenal walls, with flues that I can't see extending beyond the external cladding on any of the pictures. That provides a potential fuel source and route for the fire to take hold in the external cladding if the boiler was damaged and the gas wasn't turned off soon enough.

 

[8den]

this was posted yesterday, when its trained pros gobsmacked and cursing in disbelief then you know the situation is fucked.

I watched it this morning for the first time jaw on the floor.

 

[Cid]

A thought on Teaboy 's point on the fluting from earlier up thread... You can clearly see that in this picture (I'll put these in spoilers, but they're just the ones that are widely available, this one is after the fire, top of the building):

Spoiler

On the same note you can see that burning extends further down on the columns in images after the fire. Obviously I have no idea whether this is actually significant... (BBC image after the fire showing three sides of the tower):

Spoiler

 

[Casual Observer]

It's strange that the fire in a flat on the fourth floor was put out by LFB who then left the building by which time flames were visible on the outside of the building. This suggests the fire has somehow travelled unseen along a ceiling cavity or beneath the floorboards connected to the fourth floor flat.

It is known that the 2015/16 refurbishment involved the temporary removal of firestopping materials between the floors to enable the installation of new boilers. It is unclear whether these materials were replaced which, though speculation, might explain the "now you see it now you don't" manner in which the fire spread beyond it's initial source.

On a separate point, looking at the top picture in Cid's post, it's impressive how the 1974 fluted concrete columns appear relatively undamaged while pretty much everything that was added in 2015/16 is charred beyond recognition.