In a residential building, and hotels you are right they are no relocation. No floor wardens. But yearly fire drill that tenants are required to attend. And they are not relocation buildings.
But if the building is properly built, maintained, and operated 3 to 5 floors would be involved. But the people involved would exit the building. And the building should have 24/7 operation. Security, or live in management. Part of their job is acting as Fire Safety Director. The alarm should go off on all involved floors. Telling them to leave the building and not to use the elevators. Then the Fire Safety Director should get on the PA system telling the other tenants to stay put.
The latest count is 27 tower blocks have a cladding vulnerability across 15 local authorities. This is just social housing. The private sector is also affected, one budget hotel chain (premier inn) has found three hotels vulnerable.
Some authorities are being very cautious and moving everyone out and into hotels until the cladding is replaced. Some are employing fire wardens 24/7.
That is a lot of people, very disruptive. Central government will be paying the bill. It is still a very live issue and politicians are anxious to deflect the witch hunt mentality that is being stoked by the press.
A great many frustrations about public housing are coming to a head.
Housing is an issue in the UK, but it has not been very high on the political agenda for a couple of decades. That has now changed. I am hoping some good policies comes out this.
I’m afraid I can’t quite parse everything you’re saying here. 3 to 5 floors would be involved in what?
There did used to be live-in caretakers (janitors) in blocks like this (my Dad was one) and that might have made some difference here. They’re useful for safety in all sorts of ways, of course. But I’ve never, ever known a residential block to have fire drills - or a PA system. Tbh I find it unlikely that residential tower blocks in the US have PA systems.
I was once in an evacuation for a fire alarm of the Marina Towers in Chicago. It was pretty awful, and the interior spaces are all on the small side and there were so many elderly who had trouble with the stairs. I mean, going downstairs seems simple but even for someone able-bodied going down 20 flights can be fatiguing. I don’t recall a PA, but there were alarms throughout the building and some people controlling the crowd flow. Don’t have exact recollection - this was back in the 1980’s, or 30+ years ago, but even back then there were residential towers with fire safety measures in place.
It can be done, even if it isn’t being done, or is done in a spotty fashion.
Depending on the city. 3 floors involved. The fire floor one above and one below. 4 Floors One above and two below, 5 floors two above and two below. The floors above provide for safety incase the fire goes up, the floors below are for the fire department to stage at.
To be in compliance with the nation fire code in the US in a high rise building annual fire drills are required, and an fire alarm system complete with, horns, strobes, and speakers. It is a required for the fire panel be capable to make announcement from. So yes they do or they should not be passing annual fire inspections.
these are not required on low rise or mid rise building. And for most building being over 6 stories classifies the building as a high rise. The standard is based on fire truck with a 100 foot ladder at a 70 degree angle. If the ladder can not reach the highest occupied floor then the building is classified as a high rise.
You really have PA systems and fire drills at residential buildings in the US? I find that astounding. Do you have a cite for that?
At Grenfell IMO there should have been a second means of escape, a sprinkler system and possibly fire alarms. I say possibly because it’s not clear whether there were fire alarms or not - there would have been smoke alarms because they’re mandated by law for rented properties* and the fire brigade had visited to check this just the Saturday before. Also fire alarms usually disable the lifts and many of the tenants used the lifts to escape - they would not have been able to get out quickly enough by the stairs even if there were a second staircase. But I just can’t see fire drills working for a residential high rise and PA systems seem a bit pointless.
And of course with the way this fire spread it’s likely that even the best safety requirements would have failed to save everybody. Every floor was on fire within fifteen minutes.
*This is under something called the HHSRS - The Housing Health and Safety Rating System - but I’m finding it very hard to find a link that’s not just a long and vague PDF. This is partly because there was a newish law relating to private landlords and smoke alarms so that’s all Google wants to show me right now. As a social housing tenant I can say they’re pretty insistent about smoke alarms (they remind you they can break into your property to install them if necessary) and it would be extremely surprising if this building didn’t have them. The landlord would have been committing an offence if so. It’s not like there are no fire safety laws at all!
Going downstairs can be hell on bad knees. I think I could make it down 20 flights with the threat of fire behind me but I’d be in agony by the sixteenth floor. Before my knee replacement I don’t know if I could have.
I am looking for the books and hand outs from my fire safety director class. But since retiring I have put some of them away and many I left On my last job because I would not need them. The NFPA has a lot of sections and I am not very good finding things on line. But I will try.
I do not understand why you find it so hard to believe that is required for a fire system to also include speakers and amps. The additional cost is a small item on a list of larger items.
Remember we are also a country that will require money be spent if it will save lives.
With no sprinklers a full and proper alarm system would not have saved many lives.
Also in the US a fire alarm panel goes into alarm the elevators (lifts) may not be disabled. That only happens if the smoke detector in an elevator lobby goes into alarm. All the elevators servicing that lobby will be recalled to the ground floor. In California the recall system in any building is required to be properly tested monthly. The elevator inspector should check to see that they are being properly tested. But the enforcement is iffy.
I don’t see that anyone else has said it, so just to say, that is why those American NYC / Chicago apartment buildings you saw in old movies had those iconic ugly external fire escape stairs. The open metal ones that didn’t quite reach the ground - they had those ladders that slid down, or people jumped up too.
That stuff was all retro-fitted to existing buildings, following things like the Chicago school fire, and the NYC garment disctrict fire, and lots of other fires causing loss of life.
Does this mean it will be difficult to prosecute the companies that installed the cladding?
'Building regulations documents did not specifically say PE-core panels should not be used, but three industry experts interviewed by Reuters said that did not mean builders were clearly permitted to use them. That is because British safety regulations across many industries are usually principles- rather than rules-based.
This means the law often requires companies to act safely without giving a specific definition of what this would involve, said Christopher Miers of Probyn Miers.
Firms are instead expected to be able to prove in court that they behaved in a way that their industry would consider safe, given current knowledge and technology, these experts added. (Editing by Catherine Evans)’
Heard on the radio today somebody suggesting that cladding should be massively regulated (which is a normal Australian response).
It’s an interesting contrast with Concrete. Concreate is not massively certified and regulated. But at every high-rise building site, they take sample of the actual wet concrete, let it cure, and test it’s streangth. Because a high-rise tower made from the wrong concrete will fall down.
Clearly there was an (international) failure of engineering supervision.
The reason that concrete is tested on building sites isn’t that it’s “not massively certified and regulated” but that it’s produced on-site, so there can be tremendous variation in the quality of the finished product. The cladding (and most other building materials like drywall, doors, steel beams and wooden studs) are produced in a factory, where the quality of the product is, more or less, consistent.
Clearly, there has been tremendous vairability of the quality of cladding, produced onsite at many different factories, and sold by many different wholesalers, and used by many different builders. One solution to this problem, used for things like structural bolts (which come in many different grades which are indistinguishable by sight), is to use sample testing.
Direct supervision is one of the standard methods. In this case, given that there have been many cladding fires in many countries, it is obvious in retrospect that people doing building certification should have been aware, and should have been testing.
The level of engineering certification required for renovations is much lower than that required for building construction, but internationally, many of the cladding fires have been on new buildings.
