Doubly true for fire. Don’t think about anything but getting out.
For anyone interested there is now a 1,000 page report:
https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/phase-1-report
Another update:
I know that this is an old post, but this whole idea of “panic” annoys me. There’s this big, incorrect mythos that’s grown up around disaster planning. A whole lot of people think that panic during disasters is way more common than it actually is.
Page 4 of this report is highly relevant to this particular discussion.
And for those who like books, this one is quite fascinating.
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry is still going on and it is very thorough. In this case the residents were not panicing because they were calling the emergency services. Unfortunately the advice they were given was to stay put. The firefighters stuck to their regular procedures and kept discipline even though it must have been very obvious that the fire was spreading on the outside.
During the London Tube bombings of 2005, a similar situation prevailed. The instructions were for the emergency services to hold back in case there was second bomb. So people went unattended and died.
Same happened in the 2017 London Bridge terrorist attack by three knife wielding terrorists. Paramedics were prevented from attending the seriously injured.
In the UK the culture is to regard the emergency services as heroes and there is always a lot of praise for them during these disasters.
However, they frequently make mistakes during emergencies and trust in their judgement can be misplaced. Often their standing orders and procedures are found to be inadequate. There is a presumption that all scenarios have been anticipated and discipline must be maintained at all costs. They rely on a command and control system that is intact, fully manned by experienced leaders and well integrated with other emergency services that communicate and co-ordinate perfectly. In fact the systems often break down and the leadership qualities of those in charge are sometimes found to be inadequate.
The Firefighters at Grenfell stuck to the rule book and the rule book was wrong. It never anticipated an exterior cladding fire despite the fact that such fires had been seen before, the book had not been updated. There is often a huge tension between those on the ground who can clearly see the situation merits a different approach and the training that mandates a strict hierarchy, discipline and standard procedure. So it was that the London Fire Service failed the residents of Grenfell Tower on that fateful night.
But this was one part of a cascade of failures that led up to this disaster.
I am following the inquiry, the latest meetings have covered the roll of the architects, contractors and suppliers of the cladding that went on the outside of the building. It is sad tale of greed and fraudulent missrepresentation of materials for cladding buildings that dangerously inflammable but sold as safe.
I guess this is a case of institutional failure, where the checks and balances that would normally operate failed at several points leading to a disaster.
This is far from over. There are hundreds of apartment blocks like this and a huge, mounting bill that needs to be paid to replace all this cladding. Apartment owners all over the UK are unable to sell their apartments and facing bankruptcy by being burdened with the cost of fire wardens in constant attendance in case of fire. Grenfell Tower is a national scandal.
The Black Saturday bushfires were fires Victoria.Australia in the summer of 2009.
173 people were killed, partly because of repeated advice that they should shelter in place (stay in their homes) when the fire came near. This was based on the idea that a lot of people driving wildly about in the smoke and fire would be a bad thing.
But it was mostly based on a particular typical kind of Australian wildfire, where the fire rushes quickly through the pasture towards the isolated house, burns briefly around it, and passes on. The house being well prepared for fire in a cleared area.
For some reason this advice was promulgated by country fire authority (largely responsible for protecting farms with isolated farmhouses), and accepted by the police, and both organisations were continuing to tell people this even as the fire closed in on people housed in dense dry and highly flammable eucalypt forests.
It took four years to figure this out?
Apart from the emotional reasons some have for not knocking it down, it’s a difficult engineering feat because it’s in a very densely urban area and is also on top of an underground line.
A badly damaged building that will continue to deteriorate as time goes by should come down. Emotional nonsense to the contrary should be dismissed.
A damaged building in a densely occupied urban area should stay up unless there is no way to repair it. Emotional nonsense to the contrary should be dismissed.
The inquiry into the disaster has published its final report.
It is ugly reading, and few involved at any stage escape criticism whether for incompetence or dishonesty.
The Grenfell Tower disaster was the result of “decades of failure” by central government to stop the spread of combustible cladding combined with the “systematic dishonesty” of multimillion-dollar companies whose products spread the fire that killed 72 people, a seven-year public inquiry has found.
In a 1,700-page report that apportions blame for the 2017 tragedy widely, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the chair of the inquiry, found that three firms – Arconic, Kingspan and Celotex – “engaged in deliberate and sustained strategies to … mislead the market”.
He also found the architects Studio E, the builders Rydon and Harley Facades and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s building control department all bore responsibility for the blaze.
Studio E demonstrated “a cavalier attitude to the regulations affecting fire safety”. Its failure to recognise that the plastic-filled panels on the high-rise tower were dangerous was not the action of a “reasonably competent architect” and it “bears a very significant degree of responsibility for the disaster”, the inquiry found.
The inquiry was highly critical of the tenant management organisation (TMO), which was appointed by the local authority, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), to look after its thousands of homes but, according to the report, consistently ignored residents’ views. The TMO chief executive, Robert Black, established a “pattern of concealment … in relation to fire safety matters” and the TMO “treated the demands of managing fire safety as an inconvenience” in “a betrayal of its statutory obligations to its tenants”, the report said.
Meant to include the link to the story
Who ended up paying damages for it?
There was a civil settlement of £150m, which involved 14 defendants. This includes the UK government, the local council, and the firm that manufactured the cladding, Arconic, among others.
That settlement will be shared out among 900 survivors and relatives.
It doesn’t affect criminal liability.
Bumpdate
It’s finally going to be dismantled, but not before the 8th anniversary of the fire in June.