The wrong panels
Oh guess what, the cladding on Grenfell Tower that went up like a torch wasn’t supposed to be there.
The cladding used on Grenfell Tower, which has been widely blamed for spreading the blaze, is banned in the UK on buildings of that height, Philip Hammond has said.
The chancellor told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show: “My understanding is the cladding in question, this flammable cladding which is banned in Europe and the US, is also banned here.
“So there are two separate questions. One: are our regulations correct, do they permit the right kind of materials and ban the wrong kind of materials? The second question is: were they correctly complied with?
“That will be a subject that the inquiry will look at. It will also be a subject that the criminal investigation will be looking at.”
Regulations are there for a reason…
He was also asked if he voted for or against a labour amendment to the Tory Housing Bill to make rented properties ‘fit for human habitation’. He answered that he didn’t remember. Andrew Marr had to remind him that he did vote against it.
Many of the MPs who voted against further regulations in the rental market are themselves landlords, like those three:
Gloucestershire MPs explain why they voted against rule to make homes ‘fit for human habitation’ in wake of devastating Grenfell Tower fire
Oyyyyy.
Not a very eloquent response – but the wells of disgust sometimes get depleted after a long day.
I can understand that. Disgust and anger. One of the reasons I couldn’t do what you do day after day. More praise you!
I was away with friends over the weekend. One of those friends is a very senior Health and Safety Officer for Leicester Council (and also does some contract work for private companies). His take on Grenfell Tower was very interesting as it was very different to what I, or anyone else commenting on this blog, has understood.
He says that, while building regulations exist and provide an absolute minimum standard for various construction activities, the focus of the fire officers will not be whether those regulations were adhered to or not. Instead, they will apparently look at the incident and ask why it happened.
In the case of fire safety in any building, the area is subdivided into fire compartments. These compartments are bounded by fire doors and flame retardant material in the walls and floors/ceilings. The idea is that a fire in one compartment – which may be a single room, but more likely will be a single apartment, or a pair of apartments – will take a known amount of time to spread to the next compartment. This amount of time is a minimum of 30 minutes, often an hour or longer. You know those heavy doors part way along hotel corridors with keep shut notices? Firedoors. Look closely and, in the UK at least, you’ll find a small metal disc with a number on it. If it says “30” then that means that the door will stop flame and smoke getting through for 30 minutes. 30 minutes, in the UK, is more than enough time for the Fire Service to turn up and safely evacuate the building (we’re a small island with most of our population in dense groups). So normally, in a High Rise building, the official advice is to call the Fire Service, stay put in your sealed fire compartment – unless you are right next door to the fire, in which case move laterally along the building and put another fire door between you and the fire source. You’ve moved compartments. You’re safe for at least 30 minutes. The stairs are always a sealed fire corridor.
My friend says that there are simply no other suspects in the frame for how this fire moved except for the cladding. He also says, and I found this interesting, that it isn’t a case of whether or not this is criminal but simply of trying to track down the people responsible. This is where I was quite surprised by how he said the investigation would work. Apparently, just having followed the minimum guidelines laid out in the relevant contruction standards is not enough. My friend – Dave, let’s call him Dave, which actually is his name but tells no one anything as I know about twelve Daves – says that the whole of H&S responsibility rests on a standard of “reasonableness”. ie when the cause is identified, the construction company cannot point to standards and say, “But look, we followed these guidelines.”
If they do, Dave says that the investigators have the duty to ask, “Was this reasonable care? Did this company, with their experience of maintaining fire safety in this kind of building work, take reasonable care in their selection of materials, their work practices, and their assessment of the risks? Did they make a reasonable choice of the building standards they chose to follow?” Dave also says that the result of their work basically says that no, they didn’t take reasonable care. If reasonable care had been taken, this would not have been able to happen.
It’s not at all how I would have imagined it to work, but I actually quite like the way it turns out. It lays all the responsibility on the construction company to err on the side of caution. They can’t hide behind nitpicking legal loopholes, or rules-lawyer the building regulations – and they can’t say, “But our client told us to do this.” It is 100% their responsibility to be professional and make sure their choices stand up to later scrutiny.
Very, very interesting.
What I’ve been assuming about the fire seems to be consistent with that account – which is that the compartments worked as they were supposed to but the exterior went up like a torch and burned in from the outside, so the compartments became irrelevant.
Yes, this is a recognised issue with cladding – it creates a chimney between the cladding and the building that fire can travel up, creating secondary fire sources. It also explains why the fire travelled so fast laterally. Normally fire travels upwards much faster than it spreads sideways – unless there’s an easy, flammable route for it to take.
Of course, because of this, the standard advice of, “Stay in your apartment,” was lethal.