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copa - you win the prize for today's poorest troll post.
Come back tomorrow, there's another daily prize up for grabs.
Frank you Muppet. That wasn't a poor troll post.
Copa, beautifully written. Never quite sure as I was reading it whether it was a piss take or not. You've summed up the PoV that a lot of industry and government have.
Money is what's important. A few dead [poor] people, WGAF?
Horrific.
Where are the apologists from early this year?
Facts; inconvenient things.
Read this...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55052380
to thegeneralist - your first and only post on this subject; all you can say is...
Frank you Muppet. That wasn’t a poor troll post.
You really are a dummy.
Do you have anything of any relevance to say?
The biggest cause of all this is privatisation of the various parts of testing and enforcement. Profit rules and those that stand up for proper standards won’t survive. BBA certificates used to be pretty reliable but the competition from other cheaper test bodies has meant even their certification needs to be read much more carefully. Suppliers demand that certificates are written in such a way that they infer compliance, that way specifiers incorrectly believe that products are suitable for certain applications and they end up used. The supplier gets the big bucks and can pass the blame to someone else in the supply chain. They will say that the specifier or contractor didn’t read certs properly or didn’t ask the correct questions.
A very common statement I see on Kiwa certification states that project specific design should be discussed with the certificate holder. That’s a brilliant get out of jail card as you can be pretty sure that doesn’t happen. I have raised my concerns about various product certification over the years and there will always be a fudge or a grey area introduced to make sure no changes are needed that might hurt the profit margin. Push it further and out comes the usual bully boy tactic of threatening legal action, unfortunately when it comes to that I’m too far down the ladder and too low paid to be considered relevant and have to give in. That is the way product certification works when it’s been privatised
To make matters worse Building Control privatisation is a nightmare. Where is the incentive for a building control body to reject work and increase the cost of a project? Do that too often and the contractor will just employ a different surveyor.
Even the creation of any new legislation now is open to corruption, the so called experts that are consulted when considering changes to legislation are usually from the industry. It’s an open check book for them to make sure legislation forces the sale of their product or services.
It’s hard to be in my side of the building trade and care about safety and quality before profit.
If you haven’t listened to the regular bbc grenfell inquiry podcast please look it up, it is a very good bit of journalism and the host either knows the industry or puts an impressive amount of work into finding out. The one part that stands out to me is the interview with the building control surveyor, it’s worth noting that contractors and architects try to point the finger at him saying it was his job to keep them right. I’d imagine he was the lowest paid link in that chain but was expected to keep everyone else right?
Rant over for now
Diary from the inquiry for those not into podcasts. Sobering reading.
I’m mostly with Daz on this I think, the 737 Max being another example of the consequences of poor regulation. Having said that, individuals in businesses have both legal and moral responsibilities as well. I work for a large corporate and we’re constantly being trained in anti-corruption, morals, ethics etc. It’s amazing how quickly these things seem to go out the window when the chance to make a fast buck comes along (not referring to my business here I hasten to add, but my experience in general).
Also.... whistleblowers in all industries need far, far better protection than they get currently. It seldom ends well for a whistleblower.
I'm sad to say I whistle-blew at a former employer many years ago, and was told to get back in my box. It was a way more minor thing than this, orders of magnitude different and certainly not a life or death situation and in the grand scheme of no importance. I caved, I needed my job more than the ethics at the time and it really wasn't that big a thing.
I have a lot of sympathy for the employees in this case that were for whatever reason unable to act and now have the stain of their lack of action to carry around.
There's supposed to be protection for whistleblowers, the realities are different. The bosses that create the culture are the ones that must be accountable.
Ultimately in my mind it's the cladding manufacturer or UK distributor that needs the finger pointed at. Architect would have spec'd from a catalogue, and was told it met UK safety standards. Contractor installed spec given by architects. Building control and planning would have signed off design based on approved spec. But if the cladding doesn't do what the spec says and cheated their way through the testing process then it ultimately falls back on them....
All other lines of enquiry are for political reasons and/or for trying to future proof the system.
Architect would have spec’d from a catalogue,
I think theres a little bit more to it than that. However the material claimed to perform the cladding design effectively coated the whole building in chimneys - a little design flourish created 4 vertical voids up each face of the building linking all the openings - which in the summer would have been open . Poor fitting and detailing meant there were openings into the cladding around the windows. Unwittingly a system was designed that delivered fire from apartment to apartment up and around the whole building even though the structure was originally designed and engineered specifically to prevent exactly that outcome. Things would still have gone pretty badly even if the cladding performed exactly as promised.
It was a perfect storm of all the things that could have gone wrong going wrong - most likely because all the elements were working in ignorance of each other. The cladding manufacturers wouldn't have known the way that architect would have configured their product - there will be plenty of designs and application that will work well enough with that material , the architects didn't know how the real-world performance of the material compared to the spec sheet because I doubt many architects get to make full scale models of their designs for destructive testing, the builders didn't know risk the design created and how important sealing those apertures were to mitigate that, the fire brigade wouldn't have imagined that the cladding totally undermined the designed compartmentalisation of he building had been completely compromised by the cladding and that their strategy which had been in place for decades for fighting a fire in that kind of building and managing the occupants now had to be completely reversed.
Then there were driving factors outside the material and applications - ones of cost and not least ones of snobbery - a client who valued the view from the windows of wealthier residents over the quality of life of the building's tenants.
You couldn't conspire to make things as bad as they were - nobody, even with the most evil intentions has the imagination or flare to get all those agencies to buy into their scheme - to align all those failures and create that cascade of consequences.