This is 2017. How can a high rise building exist without fire sprinklers, multiply stairways, or full fire alarm? I do not understand!
The British PM made the statement that there will be a proper investigation into what caused the fire. Who the hell cares what caused the fire. The real question is why was the building being allow to be occupied without fire life safety systems. What official allowed the owners to rehab the building and not to bring it up to standard?
I have worked in High rise buildings that had to have fire sprinklers and proper fire alarm systems reto fitted into the building, And that work was done in the 70s and 80s.
I feel like the owners, and officials should be brought up on murder charges.
I know I am ranting so if the mods think it best please move this post to the proper area.
The building was built in 1974. You can’t retrofit a 1974 building with a second, fireproof staircase.
You can retrofit it with a sprinkler system, but apparently the UK building codes don’t require this, or at any rate don’t require it consistently.
Early indications are that a large part of the problem was (defective?) cladding on the outside of the building causing the fire to spread very rapidly and engulf the whole building. It’s not clear if a sprinker system could have prevented this.
The UK fire regulations for high rise dwellings are based on the idea of passive fire containment rather than active fire control. Fire alarms are purposefully not installed under the belief that evacuating the whole building for a contained fire would be unnecessary, and would likely cause panic and impede the fire services from reaching and tackling the fire. It would be up to the fire services to asses the situation and evacuate those at risk.
Clearly the Grenfell Tower fire was NOT contained and so the systems failed. You can be pretty certain that a major reassessment of the regs is imminent.
Note that these particular fire standards do not apply to office premises or hotels where containment was not seen as practicable.
No, ‘you can’t retrofit a building with a new fire stair’, -------without sacrificing some internal floor space. It’s just that rental space income is valued above the lives of the residents.
How does the expense of a retrofit prevent smoke detector installation/requirements? Or be the cause of hoses not long enough to reach the whole space?
But seriously, if you’ve grandfathered in shoddy fire prevention and safety measures, why let them then clad in wood?
How do they get to claim poverty concerning safety measure while doing an expensive rehab to the building?
Where I live none of these shoddy safety measures would have passed the fire code in 1974! Only one fire escape, no sprinklers system, insufficient hosing and no smoke detectors? Wouldn’t have passed then, and wouldn’t be permitted to house people today without those systems in place.
The org that owns this place apparently self certifies for fire safety (what?), and is protected from financial liability for lives lost and homes ruined. What incentive is there to NOT choose profit over safety?
Imagine how safe an airline would be, if they had that deal? Self certify ‘safe enough’, maximizing profit with no financial liability for losses. Would you fly that airline?
And running a gas line through the ONLY fire escape? Someone actually signed off on that? Where I live those involved would be going to jail for that decision. How is that not criminal in London? How do the people who insisted on that, sleep at night?
Seems to me this is an example of why government regulation is necessary, and necessary for it to have some teeth for enforcement as well, because the “free market” doesn’t prevent these things very well.
Except that the building was owned by a government (a London borough, which is the equivalent of a city in he United States). However, the incident might show that regulation by the national government is necessary.
Self-certification is pretty normal for compliance with regulation now - enforcement would require a huge staff of inspectors, auditors and other busybodies - and those are the jobs that typically disappear when funding gets cut and authorities have to find savings.
Huge penalties for failing to comply are supposed to keep everyone honest.
Chicago has done a damn fine job of creating and imposing fire safety regulations since the late 19th Century, including corruption-ridden public housing that, despite its many flaws, never had an entire tower go up in flames. LOTS of fires in individual units over the years, but such fires were contained by the structures and damage restricted to the affected unit and those immediately adjacent. And please don’t use the excuse that Grenfell was tall (Chicago is, after all, known for its skyscrapers and public housing had tall towers, too) or old (Chicago has better fire safety in century-old buildings that what has been described for Grenfell - I know because I’ve lived in low-rent Chicago buildings dating back to around 1900).
If the city of Chicago can do it, why can’t London?
The again, the public housing in Chicago is fugly concrete without external cladding - not pretty, but not flammable either.
There’s no possible excuse. It doesn’t even matter how well others are doing it (except that it proves it is possible). It’s not as good as Chicago because it’s not good enough.
Built in 1974. It should have been built with Smoke towers 2 of them and should have had sprinklers installed in it when built. Is the London building codes stuck in the 1800s?
The cladding was updated in the recent retrofit. From what I have gleaned from reports the cladding that was recently installed was a sandwiched composite construction of aluminum with a core, not wood.
There are two versions of such cladding available. One has a polyethylene core and the other has a mineral fibre core. Polyethylene is cheaper, but flammable. And that is what they installed on Grenfell Tower, without exterior breaks to limit the spread of potential fire. :smack:
Having seen this fire I simply cannot fathom why this material with a polyethylene core is even legal to produce, sell, and install as a construction material.
I’ve seen this claim a number of times. Most fire towers I’ve been in have some pipe(s) running thru them. Not exactly sure what they are from the outside, fire dept standpipes, clean water, or drain water; probably the first would be my guess.
What I haven’t seen, & maybe I missed it - did the gas pipe rupture at any point & make the fire tower unusable?
Most US new construction that I’ve seen has a separate cinder block ‘tower-within-a-tower’ fire escape. An argument could be made that since it will take fire that much longer to get into the tower than anywhere else in the building it is the safest place for a gas line. The counter being if/when it fails & catches fire, it’s catastrophic as you’ve now fouled the fire escape with flammable material in a chimney-like setting.
Early indications are that the plastic cladding installed on Grenfell was a significant factor in this tragedy. It seems that London has been wrapping it’s “unsightly” public housing in plastic in recent years to make it look better. Better they had left the exteriors bare concrete and made some real and safe improvements.
This isn’t JUST about money - it’s about misplaced priorities. What if instead of spending all that money on cladding they had installed better alarms and smoke detectors, improved fire doors, a better ventilation system for stairs/hallways, and so forth? A bunch of people might have been living in a fugly building but they’d still be alive.
London DOES have fire codes. The British are every bit as smart as anyone else. There is no good excuse, but there are reasons this happened and there should be a harsh, objective-to-the-point-of-brutality investigation into this matter.
The sandwich cladding used on Grenfell tower has been responsible for fires in Dubai and elsewhere. The manufacturer claims that it is safe and resistant to fire spread when used correctly - with no gap between the existing concrete and the inner skin. Only time will tell if Grenfell was installed as per the manufacturer recommendation.
And the tower refurbishment did include a new floor lobby smoke extraction system, that can isolate a single floor lobby and clear the smoke from that lobby. It could not clear all lobbies at once. The fire safety plan did not anticipate fire spreading on the outside of the building into almost all units at once.
Well no, it’s not that simple. Say you could find a spot to add this new stair that worked with the circulation pattern of the building, and didn’t interfere with other mechanical systems. Great, but you can’t just go cutting through large portions of the floor system without some serious structural re-engineering. This is doubly so for a reinforced concrete structure, triply so for one that’s a high rise. Shear and wind loading resistance would be significantly altered in such a scenario, and it could only be realistically engineered with thorough as-built documentation to prove that it was built according to the original plans, assuming even those are still available. Really the best bet is to add a new stair tower off to the side.
There are a lot of questions about how the cladding was fitted. There are supposed to be firebreaks at each floor. There is also a narrow air gap to prevent condensation. It is possible that if this was botched, it may have caused the fire to spread rapidly within the cladding, the way it did.
The building code has not been updated for towers since 2006, decisions were delayed because of political changes at minister level. Apparently, there have been a lot of changes to cladding techniques that the current code does not address, particularly the use of a cheaper, non-fireproof layer. UK building codes rely on passive protection rather than active fire protection like sprinkler systems. In this case the passive protection (the fire breaks between floors) was clearly at fault.
There is a lot of public anger about this. A criminal inquiry by the police will start and the government has announced an official public inquiry. They will certainly get to the bottom of the issues that led to this disaster.
Cladding is a popular way to renovate old tower blocks. Besides the improving the appearance of the building, it also adds a layer of thermal insulation making them more energy efficient. Usually they renovate the apartments with new kitchens and bathrooms and double glazing. This block also had a new gas supply fitted and that may have been a factor.
The big question is how many other tower blocks are vulnerable in this way and what can be done to put it right. This kind of tower fire has happened in several other countries, so it may be a widespread problem in the construction industry.