Quite. The lack of sprinkler systems and even fire alarms show that the safety standards are inadequate. It's also pretty gross for someone to use this tragic event as an excuse to bash Johnny Foreigner again without citations, but then this is the same poster who claimed in one post to have been present during the Nice attack last year, then contradicted himself a few weeks later.

Yes, but I think the lawyer's point is that this new aluminium-polyethylene cladding now allows fire to Spiderman up the side of the building in a way it couldn't do before, so that historic 1970s designs and procedures, relying on apartment-by-apartment box-containment and the up-to-60-minute protection afforded by fire doors and plasterboard walls, are now useless.

Although you might well think single-staircase designs without sprinklers or integrated alarms were always asking for trouble, there hasn't actually been any such trouble in over 40 years, till this rash of cladding fires.

A lot of countries have adopted this cladding to prolong the life of high-rise housing stock in regard to insulation and appearance. At Grenfell the cladding was Celotex RS5000 fitted by Celotex of Suffolk (a subsidiary of St Gobain in France) under sub-contract from Bob Bond's Rydon Group.

As far as we know it was up to code, though Rydon edited their initial press statement, which said that the refurbishment complied with all building, fire and health-and-safety regulations, and in the new version (presumably on legal advice) they only say it met building regulations.

And, again, the regulations may not be good enough. But it's possible this cladding will suddenly become unpopular for the most cogent and powerful of reasons, i.e. legal liability.

David Lammy MP, who lost a friend in the fire -- she's unaccounted for and the fire commissioner Dany Cotton says, 'There are unknown numbers of people in the building... Tragically we are not expecting to find anyone else alive' -- is pushing for corporate manslaughter charges. 'We should call it what it is, it's corporate manslaughter, that's what it is and there should be arrests made.' He's blowing his top a bit, but he's a Member of Parliament, and that counts for something.

The last time you accused me of this I offered to make you a bet that I was actually there and have a trusted mod adjudicate the proof I show them. You chickened out. Your proof that I wasn't there I wasn't there as that I most a thread in OOT asking about times people had been in danger, and said I wasn't. Which I wasn't. 100 yards away from a terrorist attack isn't being in danger. If I was playing it up I would have said the opposite. Yet you again repeat the accusation in yet another off topic thread. It's...weird? Please leave your personal issues in other forums. Thanks. OOT is great.

As for the cladding, hopefully this will finally get something done. This was a big political issue in Australia some years ago, but because no one died, nothing was done.

Bit of good news 2 young girls 6 and 10 found alive in their flat which was near the top of the tower. But mum dad and a baby are missing.

The fire brigade had not expected to find any survivors that high.

Hard to believe there was no sprinkler system fitted, but money was found essentially to make the outside look pretty rather than blackened aged rain streaked concrete.

I think you might have got this one wrong? There was a story about 2 missing girls being found in hospital.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...-a7792121.html

Hope I'm wrong on this as that would mean there's two extra people alive.

TS:

Don't want to derail this anymore.

The fire brigade have not found anyone alive in the building. They will now carry out a 'fingertip search', which may take weeks, to find human remains which may not be easily recognisable.

I found this on another forum, pretty brutal stuff to basically turn an apartment building into an oven just by bad construction.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...collapsed.html
the dude who posted it was a mod saying Warning: Dailymail so I guess they are a sketchy site as far as information goes.

Cladding:

They're commonly referred to as the Daily Hate Mail or Daily Sieg Heil. The average reader tends to say things like "I'm not racist but..." before launching into a rant about immigrants taking their jobs. They've posted a picture of a guy whose fridge may have started the fire, which shows you how responsible they are.

wow, that's just irresponsible

jalfrezi/tooth - please take your thing to PMs

A guy on CH4 said he got out of the building from like the 8th floor and banged on as many doors as possible as he escaped. He now regrets waking up so many people who could have died peacefully in their sleep. That hit me pretty hard

Just so tragic.

I grew up in a similar tower block. The ones in my avatar had one staircase and no fire alarms or instructions about what to do in the event of a fire. IIRC there was the occasional flat burnt out by a fire, which is not anyway statistically unlikely. This inferno is something else entirely.

If he got out there must've been a chance that some which heard his knocking got out as well.

Some newspapers reporting that there might be over 100 dead

Flats aren't naturally cold, anyway. People live in close proximity and heat travels up. You want the lifts to work, and it would have been good to have been able to have a washing machine. This cladding makes no apparent sense.

main benefit appear to be improving the aesthetic appearance of the building, an eyesore that had an adverse effect on local property prices

Who paid for it? (Sorry, I haven't been following the news on this.)

the local authority owns the building. The ~£10m refurbishment was ultimately paid for by the taxpayer.

Commander Stuart Cundy of the Met says he hopes it won't go to three figures -- 'I really do.' But there are so many missing that it might head that way.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...y-all-the-dead

Why would the local authority pay to satisfy the (dubious IMO) aesthetic taste of the private housing market?

Nagging in its various forms is a powerful thing.

The block itself was part social housing, part private tenants. It's not only about keeping up appearances for the rich neighbors - some of the privately rented flats in Grenfell were £2000/month for 2 bedrooms.

It's also about improving the appearance of hideous 60s/70s tower blocks because (if I remember) studies unsurprisingly showed that ugly blocks tended to fall prey to vandalism and neglect faster than others.

This is true. In Slovakia there are about 2 million people (including me) living in blocks of a similar design, (usually 7-floor though, when they wanted bigger they extended sideways building a series of blocks into a wall rather than upwards) and it's unheard of for fires to spread through 6 inches of reinforced concrete to the next flat, there simply isn't that much flammable material in one flat, and we're told this block had 10 inches of concrete.

e.g.



Bottom right is the "after" - what at first sight looks like fires in the other flats is the electric lights of families who live there.

It's like the episode of the Flintstones where they join the volunteer fire brigade, which says "There are no fires because everything is made of stone." as a cover to go bowling. Well everything is made of reinforced concrete.

+1. It's best if you live above someone who likes their heating turned up then you can turn down yours

Cladding is pretty much for image I think. It's pretty popular in Slovakia (the block on the picture would have originally been communist grey) but when our owner's association discussed getting it we found
a) the cost per flat would have been about 10 years of (my) total present heating bills.
b) the thermal camera imaging of the block showed the heat going out of the windows, not through the 6 inches of concrete.

Nevertheless, it's popular - the news reports about Grenfell tower suggest it was done for the exclusive benefit of passers-by but at least in Slovakia there seem to be a large number of people who are willing to pay out of their own pocket to live in a block that looks nicer from the outside (our block seems to be a minority in that we rejected it).

From what I can see when they install it the main material used seems to be polystyrene, plastered over it then painted.