Less than £5,000
Grenfell Tower refurbishers would have needed less than £5,000 to upgrade the building’s external panels to a fire-resistant version thought not to have been used, The Times can reveal.
Hundreds of aluminium panels, known as Reynobond, were installed on the 230ft west London property in a £8.6 million refurbishment. Witnesses described the building’s cladding, made up of the panels and an insulating underlayer, as going up like a “matchstick”.
Reynobond offers three types of panel: a standard one with a polyethylene core (PE) and two with fire resistant or “non combustible” cores. Grenfell Tower had reportedly been fitted with the cheaper PE version.
Well it was council flats you know. Not for People Like Us. No sense wasting £5,000 just for fire safety.
Firefighters have stopped looking for bodies because they’re worried the building might collapse.
The Labour MP David Lammy has called the Grenfell Tower blaze “corporate manslaughter” as police announced the number of dead had risen to 17 and warned it would rise further during a painstaking search of the remains of the building.
…
Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, whose friend Khadija Saye and her mother, Mary Mendy, lived on the 20th floor of Grenfell Tower and were missing, gave a voice to the growing anger in the community.
“This is the richest borough in our country treating its citizens in this way and we should call it what it is. It is corporate manslaughter. And there should be arrests made; frankly, it is an outrage,” he said.
An easy walk from Kensington Palace.
Yeah, but that £5000… that was part of the profits!
Will noone think of the shareholders??
This is such a fucking disgrace. I wonder if it can really serve as a wakeup call to the people who are so keen to ‘cut government waste’ and ‘get rid of regulations.’
This looks implausible to me at first glance but the broader point is that they could only have used materials that met current safety standards. If the cladding was not good enough then the standards were no good enough (or the manufacturer was dishonest). It is not the fault of the contractors or the client unless one or other of them deliberately and dishonestly used sub-standard materials. We should calm down. There is no reason (yet) to think that anyone was put in danger because they were poor or to save money.
Right. Because it is such a very rare occurrence for anyone to save a few pounds by shortchanging the poor. Got it.
Pinkeen, I think you are the one who missed the broader point, which is that SOMEONE made a decision that was in the worst interests of the tenants, and lead to the death of individuals in the lower echelon of society. And if the regulations are not good enough, that does not let the contractor or the client off the hook, because they are not required to use the lowest possible grade that will meet the regulations; they are perfectly able to use a higher level that will ensure safety. And if the manufacturer was dishonest, it was likely to make money, as well.
And yes, it was likely that they were put in danger because they were poor. For a rich person, you give them the top quality, and charge them accordingly. Since the poor are not able to pay as much, you put an inferior product on their building so you can make a higher profit. And saving money on things for the poor is actually quite a common thing throughout the world, so it seems likely that was in fact the motivation. When you do things that knowingly (and SOMEONE knew) put people in danger, that is reprehensible.
And the fact that this had been brought to the attention of the landlords repeatedly sort of diminishes your argument, right?
“Corporate manslaughter”. That’s a law that needs to be on the books, formally.
Pinkeen: Builders often figure that if no one official squawks, it doesn’t matter what the law on the books is.
Consider: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/16/london-fire-flammable-cladding-on-australian-buildings-is-like-the-asbestos-problem
(TL;DR version: The law in Australia says this type of material (the non-flame-retardant cladding) is only approved for interiors and low-rise buildings, but tens of thousands of high-rises also have it applied externally, anyway. And, of course, it’s worth noting that in just about every nation, industry constantly lobbies for weaker regulations and standards in order to be able to save a buck.
We just don’t know yet. It is possible, even probable, that there was some negligence at least but we don’t know. But if the safety regulations were met, that does let the council off the hook . That is what safety regulations are for, to say ‘do this and you will be safe’. If that is the case, that the regs were met but were inadequate, the fault will lay with the makers of the law, not the council that spent over £8 million refurbishing this building. The class war talk is way too previous and is being pushed by some very shady people.
There is way too much speculation in general going on before the dust has begun to settle.
Oh, please. The class war talk is long overdue, more like.
Apologies for formatting!
‘Some tragedies are not down to the evil rich.’
You seem really invested in convincing the readers of this blog that this one, in particular, isn’t.
Balls. What is getting to me is the number of people trying to manipulate the corpses of Grenfell before they are even cold to press their particular political obsession. We do not know what happened. We need to find out and act then. This is worse than undignified, it is mocking the dead.
Really?
Because nobody has ever cut corners, bought cheap materials or employed under-educated, underpaid site workers who don’t know what they’re supposed to be using.
The use of thermal cladding is covered by Regulation B4(1) of The Building regulations 2010. It states:
You know, so the building doesn’t go up like a fucking candle, exactly as we can all see happening in the video of Grenfell Tower. The dangers of external cladding contributing to flame spread resulting in multiple secondary fires is well known. You can check out Section 3 of BR135 – Fire Performance of External Thermal Insulation for Walls of Multistorey Buildings which goes into a great deal of detail about the mechanisms of this.
The point is, we know what happens when inappropriate cladding is used. We also know how to prevent it.
1. Use Materials of Limited Combustibility (MOLC) for all elements of the cladding system, including insulation, internal lining board, and external facing material. There is an official definition of MOLC.
2. Buy and use a whole cladding system that has been assessed according to the acceptance criteria of BR135. Evidence must be presented that the system has demonstrated compliance with BS8414:1 or BS8414:2 which lay down the requirements fopr non-loadbearing or load-bearing walls. This test must be carried out by a UKAS accredited testing body and supported by a classification report.
3. If no actual fire test data exist for a particular system, the client must submit a desktop study report from a suitably qualified fire specialist staing that in their opinion BR135 criteria would be met by the proposed system. This report must be backed by test data from a suitable UKAS testing body (BRE, Chiltern Fire, Warrington Fire etc). The report must specifically reference the tests that have been carried out.
4. If none of the above options are possible a holistic fire engineered approach for the whole may be considered according to BS 7974.
The last is usually used only in new builds and would not be considered suitable for a building like Grenfell Tower.
And the point of all this is that if any of those approaches had been taken, the pattern of burning observed – where the cladding burned rapidly and spread laterally as well as vertically, creating secondary fire sources as it spread, would not have been possible. There would have been a slower vertical spread, resisted by the cladding, where the fire could not use the gap between the cladding and the building to travel.
And, of course it happened because those people were poor. They have no power or influence and, if the government is more inclined to wink at dodgy landlords and builders than to protect them, they are disproportionately affected by poor building and rackrent practices. Even though tower blocks are council (social) accommodation and should be there as a way of supporting people on lower incomes.
The whole thing stinks. And I don’t think the Indie is out of line. I think they’re being good journalists and raising an issue the government would really rather they didn’t.
Yeah, the experiment of letting Pinkeen comment without pre-moderation hasn’t worked out.
That last comment is simply disgusting.
Pinkeen:
I’m a member of the UK working class. Oh, I’m an educated, reasonably well off one but my family were 100% working class, my Dad left school at 15 with no qualifications and worked in a factory his entire life. My sister and I are the first generation to have tertiary education. And I didn’t get my degree until I was in my forties (thank you, Open University). And I can tell you that the “class war” has never stopped or gone away. There has always been an “us and them” feeling within UK culture. If you’re working class you have less influence, less clout, less social privilege. So don’t talk to me about unnecessarily starting the class war talk. It’s always been here.
So, those people in Grenfell Tower? My people. My class. My peers. So don’t, don’t tell me that protesting their deaths, and agitating for the middle class businessmen who caused this to be called to account, is a case of trying to manipulate the corpses of Grenfell before they are even cold to press …[a]… particular political obsession. It’s asking for justice for people who were ignored and unable to ensure their own safety in life.
Pinkeen:
Obviously, we need to determine who, precisely, the bad actors were. That’s different than saying that we can’t say that there were bad actors involved, because if you don’t have bad actors involved, something like this cannot happen.
1: If the regulations are lax enough to allow for this cladding, then the bad actors are the writers of that legislation, and the industry lobbyists who consistently push for the least regulations they can get away with.
2: If the regulations forbade the use of this cladding on this type of construction, and it happened anyway, then the bad actors are the company that installed it, and the council that was supposed to have oversight for the project being carried out to code.
3: In either case, the company should still be on the hook because the dangers of this sort of cladding are well-known, as judged by the regulation schemes in both Australia and Germany (as have been posted in this very thread). So for the company to say, “Sure, we’ll install this cheap-ass flammable shit and keep the job under cost” is ridiculously unethical and grotesque. Council members may not know the difference between types of cladding, or understand why you use one or the other, but the contractors sure as hell should have.
And in all of the above cases, the reason they were able to get away with it for so long is because these people were poor, and thus expendable.
Pinkeen #8
Yes, and sometimes the wealthy would throw the poorish people some scraps from the table. Lucky, lucky poorish people.
Living in a wealthy area is not an advantage for the poor. The streets may be kept cleaner, and the pavements in better repair. But the food shops will be expensive. It will be Waitrose and Marks & Spencer foodhall, not Lidl and Asda.
KB Player, I was thinking something similar. The poorish people wouldn’t give a damn about local property prices, they just want somewhere to live. To suggest, as Pinkeen seemed to do, that they should be grateful to live in a wealthy didtrict is downright insulting, especially as in many parts of London the poor were there in numbers before the wealthy.
A large proportion of high-rises were built on wasteland cleared of bombed-out buildings from the Blitz and from the Victorian-built slum clearance projects aimed at giving Londoners halfway decent housing. The wealthy middle-classes simply did not exist in great number back then.
In short, the poor were there first, and as the middle-classes grew in number and top-rate property became rarer, prices of quality property shot up. The streets of Victorian terraced houses that nobody wanted to buy in the ’50’s and ’60’s became hot property, and the poor were coralled into smaller and smaller areas.
Of course, having the poor on their doorsteps held property prices down, being overlooked by social-housing in the form of ugly high-rises could knock tens of thousands of pounds off the selling price of a house.
Still, at least there’s one little part of London where being overlooked by poorish people is no longer a problem, eh Pinkeen?
Same thing has happened in New York, where the places where artists used to get cheap flats amongst the working poor are now posh, expensive places where the former residents can no longer afford to live.