It’s possibly worth pointing out that you don’t have to be rich rich to pay full council tax - just be in full-time employment, basically. As far as I can tell, Kensington is the only council in the UK that does the rebate thing.
All that is true, except that I’m not calm about it. My disgust is deep, but if I let it run rampant outside the Pit my posts could get reported.
I’m reading about this from different repports and news sites from the UK; our US press is barely poking at it and certainly isn’t focusing on the income inequality angle of it. We have more than enough examples of our own to point out; it does, in fact, happen all the time here. And no matter what the people at large want, their representatives are either in the pocket of lobbyists and interests or powerless by comparison.
Yeah, agreed. Outside observers shouldn’t mistake the calm discussion here and elsewhere for “acceptance”. People are angry, really deeply quietly angry, about this. This is a dangerous moment for the UK body politic, I think.
Not to mention the “cut regulation” memes currently in government.
Recent US examples: the lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan because those responsible opted for unsafe but cheaper water, and whatever genius thought building a subdivision on the former site of lead smelter in East Chicago, Indiana that has also resulted in poisoning people. Of course that land in East Chicago was cheap to build on - no one in the know wanted to live there!
The whole business with the local council opting for cheaper and unsafe cladding for the Grenfell Tower is just more of the same - cut costs, cut regulations, cut oversight, and fuck the poor.
True enough, but a big difference is that people are going to jail for Flint, and people will get millions in damages in the other cases. But here, it seems the body making these choices is protected from liability. I’m pretty sure nobody is going to jail. Sounds like the fire code is loose at best, (fire escapes not mandated, hose length unspecified, sprinklers/smoke detectors optional, gas line in the escape route NOT A VIOLATION!), and they self certify, so who’s to sue or send to jail?
Although living with having made those choices isn’t going to be easy regardless. Ditto for the firemen who told them all to stay in their apartments. Those will be hard shoes to walk in, I should think.
For a long time, the Salvation Army was the group specifically tasked with matching missing people in disastors up to global proportions. Freeing the the civilian and militory authorities to do things like burying the dead and clearing the roads. The Salvation Army did this through two world wars and massive refugee crises. This situation is not “extrodinary” on that scale: they used to have procedures and institutional experience with events bigger and smaller than this.
So I’m curious. Have they abdicated this area? Lost the skills?
It looks as though the walls may have been internally lined with something - that pattern of protrusions on the wall in the first photo is, I think, blobs of construction adhesive onto which some sheet material had been glued. I wonder if this internal cladding (and the sheet material for the internal non-structural walls) was all made from something flammable such as MDF. I know plaster board can decompose in a fire, but it looks like the walls actually contributed to the fire here.
…who tasked them to do this? That should answer your question. This isn’t a disaster of global proportions. This is a highly localised disaster in the capital city of one of the most important cities in the world. The roads were clear the next day and respectfully “burying the dead” is something that is a process that will take weeks, maybe months. I’m sure the Salvation Army is probably involved in some way. But there is no need for them to take the lead here, and what happened here doesn’t say anything about the Salvation Army’s ability to do anything.
And you miss exactly why you were hearing continuing reports of people looking for people, checking all the hospitals and all the refuge centres. In the day after the event: what was it you expected people to do? People were missing. You check the hospitals. You check the refugee centres. You check the churches. You check the mosques. You can’t find them. What do you do next? You check them all again. Because they are distraught and upset and they are living with the hope that maybe the person they were looking for was missed off a list, or just been rescued, or had been moved. What you are describing is simply normal behaviour, and the Sallies, the Red Cross, the Army, or the civilian authorities wouldn’t have changed anything.
It’s the same the whole world over
It’s the poor wot gets the flame
It’s the rich wot gets the rebates
Isn’t it a bloomin’ shame…
Meanwhile here’s a purported timeline of culpability from Facebook. Apply as many grains of salt as you like; I’ve double-checked some but not all statements:
I’ve seen some other FB posts implicating Labour figures in odd ways, including claiming that Ed Miliband chose the cladding, but have been unable to verify any of those claims thus far.
Sheetrock/plasterboard/drywall/wallboard is fire resistant, not fire proof. It resists fire at least in part by having water chemically bonded into the materials. The fire driving off that water is where the resistance comes in, but doing so chemically changes the composition of the board. When the water is all driven off the board physically crumbles. It basically works by ablation, so it won’t resist a fire forever, just slow down the spread - which is no small thing, if it buys people time to escape and/or be rescued.
In other words, in a really hot fire the wallboard turns to dust and crumbles, mixing with ash and other debris - basically the effect seen on the video. The interior walls are gone, the concrete shell remains with signs of wallboard having been attached, but the wallboard gone. Rated fire materials will give the result seen with a fire hot enough and/or long enough.
I don’t claim to be entirely conversant with fire codes anywhere, but back when I worked in construction we never used anything but drywall/wallboard for interior walls and surfaces. Maybe a private individual might use it for something involving changing the interior, but the industry wouldn’t. Aside from fire codes, wallboard is a LOT easier to cut and shape than MDF.
Sure - the question is though, what was the fuel? I guess the kitchen cabinets will have been chipboard, and there will have been soft furnishings etc. Maybe that’s enough to have caused this sort of damage.
Remember the context. We’re already talking about a building that was ‘made over’ by sheathing it with flammable plastic. What should have happened and what did happen are already at odds.
Sure, but there are other materials - including boards with foam core etc.
She represents the nation, not a party. That gives her moral authority and freedom of action not avaialble to lesser figures.
That she does not abuse it, only increases her moral authority.
That’s a stunning level of destruction. That flat must’ve burned kiln-hot. Finding human remains in that will be VERY challenging - It’s a virtual crematorium there.
I’ve never, even in a tower block, seen a real made of MDF. Plasterboard, yes, with a render. There are quite a lot of differences between UK and US building terms so I’m not sure when we’re using the same terminology.
The kitchens will mostly have looked like this: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=decent+homes+standard+kitchen+layout&client=ms-android-cubot&prmd=isnv&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjxpZuoicrUAhWJIcAKHbP2AEYQ_AUICSgB&biw=360&bih=560#imgrc=_h_Il1ZisCDRyM: The “decent homes” standard meant that all kitchens over 30 years old in social housing were replaced if they were in poor repair (and the standards were so defined that most kitchens were in poor repair). I had the same kitchen at my old place and at my new place. Colour varies slightly but that’s it. Lino on the floor, MDF cupboards and chipboard work surfaces with some sort of water resistant veneer. The private flats won’t have had them but almost all the social ones will. I really hope they don’t turn out to be a contributor to the fire because replacing all of them would be impossible.
Btw I did mean full council tax payers, not fill. Sorry - I’m on my phone and sometimes miss predictive text errors.
Point of order: Johnson’s cuts to the fire brigade were reviewed last year by the current mayor, Sadiq Khan, who did not change them and indeed continued with further cuts of £23.5M. And the fire brigade responded admirably anyway.