UK - Huge fire rips through Grenfell Tower, Latimer Road, White City, London, June 2017

[Ellmau]

If anyone missed the Panorama documentary at 8.30 it's on iplayer.

 

[Elainera]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40330789

So the fridge was NOT the start of the devastating fire?

 

[Ellmau]

I think they think it was, but that it restarted and jumped to the cladding.

 

[Ellmau]

A journalist says it was a disaster waiting to happen:

In 2010, I spent six months working on a BBC investigation into concerns about fire safety in refurbished high rises. Our findings were conclusive. Fire chiefs and safety experts all agreed that the vogue for cladding old concrete blocks with plastic fascia, removing asbestos and replacing steel window frames with ones made of UPvC cancelled out all the fire prevention measures that had been built into the blocks.

In their original form, tower blocks are stacks of concrete boxes, insulated from each other. If a fire breaks out in one flat, it will be contained so long as the fire doors remain closed – that is why the advice for other residents is to stay put in their flats and place wet towels under the doors to stop the smoke.

By the turn of the millennium, the post-war tower blocks that are scattered through Britain’s cities had become rundown and ugly. So in 2000, Tony Blair’s government launched the Decent Homes Programme, a huge scheme to update the social housing stock, making it more environmentally friendly, comfortable and pleasing to the eye. For high-rises there were two options – either refurbish them, or pull them down and build new low-rise housing in their place. The slightly cheaper option was to do them up.

Billions of pounds of public funds were handed out to contractors to carry out the upgrades – £820 million in London alone. In almost all cases, the drab concrete was wrapped in brightly coloured plastic. It may look far nicer, but the material used in most cases is also highly flammable, while the tiny space between the façade and the concrete acts as a chimney in the event of a fire, sucking the flames up the building in seconds. Grenfell Tower had been clad in those plastic fascia during its revamp last year – it is looking increasingly likely that that is the reason why the fire engulfed it within fifteen minutes.

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/grenfell-tower-blaze-disaster-waiting-happen/#

 

[Elainera]

I think they think it was, but that it restarted and jumped to the cladding.

That's confusing. It wasn't put out completely? How could it restart? Surely the fridge was unplugged then.

 

[Ellmau]

I don't know, I dodn't quite understand that part.

 

[Ironside]

That's confusing. It wasn't put out completely? How could it restart? Surely the fridge was unplugged then.

The fridge fire was out but firefighters hadn't realised that the fire had spread out the window and was on the outside of the building.

 

[Ellmau]

I womder if open windows had an impact at all.

 

[MelmothTheLost]

A journalist says it was a disaster waiting to happen:

So in 2000, Tony Blair’s government launched the Decent Homes Programme, a huge scheme to update the social housing stock, making it more environmentally friendly, comfortable and pleasing to the eye.

That's not quite right. Part of the work was indeed to improve energy efficiency in order to help the UK meet EU environmental targets, but aesthetic considerations were not a major factor. The cladding which "prettified" the older tower blocks was primarily installed to protect the insulation materials behind it.

At the housing association of which I was a director at this time, we replaced gas boilers with more energy-efficient combi ones (even though they will be lucky to last 15 years instead of the nigh-on 40 years the old ones had worked for); we replaced the kitchens and bathrooms complete and checked all the wiring. Where it needed replacing it was replaced, and where it wasn't we massively increased the number of sockets to accommodate the number of appliances and gadgets people now use. We installed smoke and CO alarms where tenants didn't have them. We looked at the feasibility of removing asbestos but since it was all still sealed the decision was taken to leave it in situ rather than cause unnecessary risk in breaking it up to remove it.

 

[MelmothTheLost]

I womder if open windows had an impact at all.

That's very possible. It was a very warm night. In the Lakenhal House tower block fire in 2009, when 6 people died, it was thought that the fire spread between flats at least partly by taking hold of curtains billowing out of windows and then spreading into the flat whose curtains they were. That too happened on a very warm night.

 

[silverjug]

If it was only slightly cheaper to refurbish and so much money was being given out to contractors it would have made more sense to pull them down. Speaking as someone who lived on a council estate but not in a tower, they became shabby and run down very quickly, aand were ugly.

 

[CoverMeCagney]

A man who lives close to Grenfell Tower and knew families in the building has claimed that 42 bodies - including those of children and old people - were found huddled together in one room after the block was engulfed by a devastating fire.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/local-resident-claims-42-bodies-10647875?ICID=FB_mirror_main

I don't know if this source is valid (a friend of a fireman) but I can't imagine the horror.

 

[MelmothTheLost]

If it was only slightly cheaper to refurbish and so much money was being given out to contractors it would have made more sense to pull them down. Speaking as someone who lived on a council estate but not in a tower, they became shabby and run down very quickly, aand were ugly.

The council high rise flat developments were built cheaply and quickly, and unfortunately concrete as a material doesn't look attractive for long in our wet climate. However they were high density housing solutions to high density housing problems, ie they replaced the insanitary and overcrowded inner city slums which were being progressively demolished in the 1950s and 1960s.

I suspect a lot of younger Brits simply do not know how bad the UK's housing situation was in the 1940s and 1950s due to the massive loss of housing to German bombing during the war. There was an urgent need to replace that, as well as gradually replacing the slums that remained. Like them or not, but tower blocks were a solution that those problems.

The country's financial situation was also pretty crap. We did not finish paying off US lend-lease loans from WWII until the turn of the present millennium. Almost up to the end of the 1970s we had strict exchange controls in place affecting ordinary citizens, which meant clear limits on how much foreign currency you could buy and how much sterling you could take out of the country. My parents' bank used to publish a small booklet at the beginning of each summer setting out how many lira, pesetas or various types of francs you could buy against fixed exchange rates. And then we had the regular sight of the Chancellor of the Exchequer going cap in hand for bailouts from the IMF. By the end of the 1970s the UK was frankly BUST.

 

[MelmothTheLost]

A man who lives close to Grenfell Tower and knew families in the building has claimed that 42 bodies - including those of children and old people - were found huddled together in one room after the block was engulfed by a devastating fire.

I'll believe that when it's confirmed by an official source. There's a LOT of fake news still going around.

 

[MelmothTheLost]

If it was only slightly cheaper to refurbish and so much money was being given out to contractors it would have made more sense to pull them down. Speaking as someone who lived on a council estate but not in a tower, they became shabby and run down very quickly, aand were ugly.

It's possible that the situation was complicated by the fact that a number of the flats were privately owned, presumably as a result of the right to buy legislation of the 1980s. If the entire block had been council flats the situation would have been much more straight forward.

 

[wfgodot]

Prescient lyrics, in part: "Here a tower shining bright / Once stood gleaming in the night / Where now there's just the rubble / In the hole..." (Thanks bh.)

[video=youtube;BJIoDTcPGds]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJIoDTcPGds[/video]

 

[Ellmau]

It's possible that the situation was complicated by the fact that a number of the flats were privately owned, presumably as a result of the right to buy legislation of the 1980s. If the entire block had been council flats the situation would have been much more straight forward.

Plus there would have been the need to rehouse residents in the interim.

 

[Ellmau]

Some of the survivors will need months of medical treatment:

He said some of his patients had clung to banisters to feel their way down 20 flights of stairs after fearing they were about to die.

Others had tried to save other families on their way towards the tower's exit.

Almost all were suffering the effects of smoke inhalation, with very few having burns.

"We had patients who had saved their own families but had also tried to save other families as well."

He added: "They had to make a very difficult decision. People went into the stairwells and went into toxic smoke.

Fewer in hospital than expected because so many died.

It's also feared that some survivors are not making themselves known because they may be here illegally:

The Home Office told the programme it will "not use this tragic incident as a reason to carry out immigration checks on those involved".

"We will not charge people who need to replace documentation that has been lost in the fire," it added.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40343897

 

[wfgodot]

Guardian:

Some Grenfell Tower victims may never be identified, lawyer says
‘Irregular tenancies’ complicating effort to identify victims while
some survivors fear being detained over immigration status

 

[Elainera]

Grenfell Tower fire: Survivors 'sleeping rough in parks and cars', says Kensington MP
Tuesday 20 June 2017 19:42 BST

Survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire are sleeping rough in parks and cars, according to the newly elected Labour MP for Kensington.

Emma Dent Coad said the borough was in “total chaos” and suffering from “appalling” coordination nearly a week on from the blaze that is believed to have killed at least 79 people.

“People have been sleeping in cars and in parks because they don’t know where to go and they aren’t being looked after,” she told Sky News.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...on-cars-parks-mp-emma-dent-coad-a7799506.html