In the Melbourne fire, it was found that the cladding was made by a Chinese company with non-compliant poly cores. They claimed it was compliant, but there was no check or balance to call them on their bullshit. The contractor, faced with a chioce of materials, chose the cheapest cladding making code-compliant claims. That covered the building in fuel. Because mineral fibre cores and poly cores are very hard to tell apart without testing, there was no cue to the building inspectors.
So - Contractor and building inspectors acted in good faith, and still set up a fire trap destined to kill. I think it will come out that this is a similar case.
There needs to be certification testing of any material making code compliance claims.
Yeah. I can barely bring myself to think about what it must have been like for the people inside the flats. As the number of confirmed fatalities grows that will become clearer. Couple that with:
[ul]
[li]a clear paper trail of residents seeing these problems in advance and begging for them to be fixed, [/li][li]a “tenants management organisation” that ignored them utterly and appears to have been a catspaw of the council, [/li][li]a council that has clearly failed in its duties to residents, [/li][li]the opportunities to learn lessons from previous fires that were wilfully missed, [/li][li]the general culture of abandoning known sensible regulation in favour of freeing up “the market”, and [/li][li]the effects of the austerity ideology in limiting what remaining fire safety measures were available (i.e. inspections, fitting sprinkler systems)[/li][/ul]
…and you’re left with over 100 dead people who died because they simply didn’t matter to the people in power. A disgrace.
I don’t know much about UK law (strictly English and Welsh law in this case) but there is, as UTJ said, a corporate manslaughter act.
I don’t think we have enough specific info about who made what decisions to even guess whether this will apply to anyone yet, and I wouldn’t have the legal expertise to assess that info even if I had it.
But it is at least possible that someone will be held criminally liable. There will be a strong public demand for such, I imagine.
In the hi rise fire (pdf link to FEMA analysis report) I attended back in 1989 almost all the deaths were from smoke inhalation on the higher floors.
And that was in a fire where the flames were confined to the two lower floors. It killed 16 and the flames never reached anywhere close to most of those who died. And this was in a building of only 10 floors which had two fire stairways.
Extrapolating those ideas to this Grenfell Tower fire and I fear a three figure death toll.
And there are over a dozen other blocks in London alone that have been clad by the same company using the same materials. If I lived in one of those I would be demanding that the cladding be ripped off right now.
i’ve read quite a bit about the ola fire. ola had one central stair as well. once the smoke was in the hallway it was cut off, esp. for the classrooms on the second floor. the fire went right to the space between the ceiling and the roof.
Indeed, there was a fire here in Ontario that killed three young people a few years ago that was in part due to the house they were in not even being close to code. The landlord had been told to fix it, but the fire department simply took his word for it that he had. Of course he had not, so those kids died.
Every time something like this happens, it’s because the building was preposterously unsafe, and then there’a a flurry of talk about how we have to change things, but what you invariably find is that the existing rules were already more than enough. It’s just that for whatever reason they were not followed. The very famous Our Lady of the Angels fire killed 94 people because the building was grandfathered and not up to code.
…being as delicate as possible: but it is very likely that entire families no longer exist. And I mean that literally. If, as suspected, there are over a hundred people unaccounted for, then what are people supposed to do, but continually check the hospitals and the refuge centres? Could you just sit at home, waiting for the phone to ring, if it were your family that were missing? As Lily Allen put it today:
““I appreciate that, but these are families. When you have to identify a body, you have to report it to the next of kin. There are no next of kin.”
I’m sure that the Salvation Army are doing all that they can. As are the Red Cross, the churches, the mosques, and all the other volunteer organizations. But this is an extraordinary situation. Nobody has experience in this. If anyone should be stepping up: it is the government organizations, and not the voluntary ones.
I think this might be one situation where I absolutely want the media to go to town on the story. This is something that needs to create a massive cloud of deep, lasting shame for all of the responsible individuals, organisations and policymakers.