how many of you guys have checked the Fire Alarms in your house recently

Another tip – replace batteries annually whether the alarm says they need it or not.

It’s a Christmas day job for me; you’re usually buying a million batteries anyway, 2 more is no hardship.

I can vouch for not running large appliances when out /asleep. House over the road from us was gutted due to a fire caused by the dishwasher.

Drac, that picture is incredible.

I’ve been in the situation of opening a flat door to a wall of searing heat and a wall of thick black smoke and I’ve looked out of the window and chosen the hedge to land on if it comes to it. And I’ve watched the firemen take a baby out of the window below. Fortunately know was hurt with the exception of some bad facial burns on the girl who tried the stairs.

That was from a second floor in a Glasgow tenement and the and the thought of being stuck in that block has had me shaking like a leaf today.

It is – reminded me of some of the WW images

Checked my alarms (x3 plus CO) and pressure in the extinguisher.

I’ve been in the situation of opening a flat door to a wall of searing heat

These comments are reminding me of stuff I’ve been taught in the past – this was from a US chemical plant safety briefing in the event of fire alarms…. before opening a door, don’t. Test it for heat with the back of your hand and if it’s even warm go another way or wait. And if it’s proper hot and burns you – at least you still have functioning palm and fingers.

I can vouch for not running large appliances when out /asleep. House over the road from us was gutted due to a fire caused by the dishwasher.

Doesn’t even need to be running. Siemens/Bosch ones could/would catch fire simply by being left plugged in to the mains.
Happened to a friend, who fortunately was still up at 2am and smelled burning, so could raise the alarm. Dishwasher cycle had finished hours earlier.
His incident was not a one-off.

http://www.kingspanbenchmark.com/Products/Engineered-Facade-Systems/Facade-Options

This is made by a number of people, the link is the Kingspan option, I worked for Corus who offered something similar, i have seen Ash and Lacy’s production line.

ACM simply means Aluminium Composite, the skin is made of a plastic Auminium composite sheet that is cut and folded to shape, sometimes it is then insulted with a PIR/PUR core other occasions it is un-insulated, really depends on the spec. The panels are then hung from a light steel frame that is screwed onto the existing block/concrete.

Last time I posted that people queued up to tell me the risk was so small it wasn’t worth worrying about……

I also have a friend whose house was uninhabitable due to smoke damage from a DW fire, running it overnight. Thankfully the smoke alarms woke him and his other half but even then, his abiding memory was that even though your smoke alarm probably annoys you by going off when you burn toast and there is ‘no’ smoke – the time it took from alarm waking them to realising what it was to getting out and downstairs, the house was full of impenetrable black smoke.

I’d prefer to save that waking and realising time by not being asleep in the first place.

I know the risks are tiny, and maybe i’m obsessively paranoid about fire in particular, but almost no risk is too small for me.

Talking about fire risks, remember why Samsung pulled their galaxy Tab and the issues Boeing had with fires and the Dreamliner? Li-ion batteries aren’t really that stable. So really worth paying attention to how they are handled and charged.

trouble is, people had been advised to stay in their flats in the event of a fire, so whilst I dearly hope I’m wrong…..it sounds like there could be a significant number of people trapped and in all certainty, killed!

Doesn’t bear thinking about. 🙁

Really terrible.

We have had two fires in the Paris apartment building in which we live in the past 18 months, both completely gutted the affected apartments but did not spread. One an electrical appliance fault the other an alcholic who fell asleep with candles buring as his electric had been cut off for non-payment. Advice is to remain in flat in the event of fire as per this tragedy. 1980’s construction 8 story.. Not difficult to imagine 1970’s council built to be of poor / lesser quality. That cladding seems to be a very poor choice. £2.6m for a whole building seems very little but still equates to £25,000 per flat.

Another good safety tip when staying in a hotel is to count the number of doors to the nearest fire exit from your room. This is in case you need to crawl along the corridor in smoke and you can find a way out. Hopefully the alarms and sprinklers will mean this isn’t necessary though.

We are of course assuming that the materials used are the ones they are supposed to be and not a copy made elsewhere. Wouldnt be the first time.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buV929MqlWc[/video]

We are of course assuming that the materials used are the ones they are supposed to be and not a copy made elsewhere. Wouldnt be the first time.

depends on the spec, yes the contractors may have substituted, but you would have to be a real cowboy* to substitute something totally different.

A rainscreen isn’t that difficult to make, 0.5-0.9mm steel/alu skin with a PVC/PVF finish, 20mm-ish PIR boards only held onto to light steel frame and epdm gaskets between each panel.

At this point i would be inclined to wait for the enquiry to open and see what comes from there.

*this is the building industry so anything is possible

trouble is, people had been advised to stay in their flats in the event of a fire, so whilst I dearly hope I’m wrong…..it sounds like there could be a significant number of people trapped and in all certainty, killed!

Doesn’t bear thinking about.

The problem is with a number of these buildings built in that time period, is that they only have a single stairwell.

The advice on people staying in their flat is relatively logical, as if a fire breaks out in a flat, it should be contained within the flat.

The fire brigade arrives and takes control, then deciding which floors to evacuate in an orderly manner. If everyone is trying to leave the building by the single stairwell at the same time the fire brigade are trying to get in, then chaos ensues.

Fire brigades across the country deal with several hundred fires a year in buildings similar to Grenfell, and the fire is generally contained in the flat.

Also, there is talk of no real fire alarm system, with that many flats the alarm system would be going off when someone burns their toast, and eventually someone will try to disable the system, or ignore it in the same manner people ignore car alarms going off these days.

In commercial and retail buildings there are fire wardens who should evacuate the building in an orderly manner, domestic buildlings don’t usually have wardens.

Edit: Alex Simon, social cleansing has been going on there for a good 20 years, As I said before I grew up around there, and its been eye opening how the place has changed in that time. I have absolutely no doubt that the former residents of Grenfell tower will not be returning after whatever is built to replace it.

depends on the spec, yes the contractors may have substituted, but you would have to be a real cowboy* to substitute something totally different.

More likely is incorrect installation, especially for a built up in situ system that has various separate elements. I do not know if the specification for the cladding required any kind of horizontal fire barrier every floor or every other floor, but fire barriers are the sort of thing which often requires precise attention to correct installation if it is to work. The only way of making sure it’s done properly is to monitor the installation very closely, since once it’s complete it’s extremely difficult to check afterwards whether or not it was done properly.

ignore it in the same manner people ignore car alarms going off these days

there have been numerous studies that show that people will ignore smoke alarms until someone tells them it’s real and to move.

12 confirmed fatalities, with the tally expected to rise further.

I previously worked for both render and rainscreen cladding manufacturers.

It would be standard practice on a tower block to use a non combustible insulation such as rockwool to create a firebreak at every storey beyond the second d storey.

Whilst EPS doesn’t necessarily burn it will disappear in a fire leaving a huge vertical chimney stack behind the cladding.

Look up Lakanal house fire…….

We’ve done the steel frames for a few housing developments in the past. A few times the design has been changed to allow for lower ceiling heights , thus doing away with the need for a sprinkler system with its associated cost/ maintenance *
*Or that’s what I have been told by various Project Mangers

So, I’m on a work trip sat in a hotel restaurant googling the best knots for escaping fires and the waitress walks past just as I’m basically scrolling through pictures of nooses 😳

So, I’m on a work trip sat in a hotel restaurant googling the best knots for escaping fires and the waitress walks past just as I’m basically scrolling through pictures of nooses

😐

Leaving aside the real, direct trauma of the event, what you can’t see in the photos Drac has posted is the newly installed children’s playground.

For me it’s a reminder of the number of families you’d see there every day – and the inevitable direct impact this has had on people of all ages, including children.

It’s thinking about the playground and the positivity that embodied that makes me most sad.

Woke up to this news this morning, as most people probably did. Really bad and upsetting. One of my customers today was in tears about it. Feel sorry for everyone involved.

drac, i hope the Sun dont get hold of that picture of all the lazy firemen laid down doing nowt…….

AlexxSimon – I think they got a Labour MP at the recent election who is very much against gentrification and empty flats owned by people who have no interest in the area. I’m not 100% sure on the constituency boundrys. Really is sad the way people are treated for not being born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

eight tower blocks all 10 storeys high in a local city, 2 have had sprinklers fitted despite the residents kicking up a fuss, about sprinklers being fitted, the risk of water damage etc was sited, these two blocks are rented to over 55,s so little risk of vandalism.

Hopefully they will now realise they may save their lives.

Indeed. Been comments on the radio from people involved in investigating these kinds of fires and compared other similar fires with rapid engulfing of the cladding, and the building interior suffered less damage and lives were saved simply because they had sprinklers.

very sad .

A lot of people still think sprinklers go off like in the movies, they don’t, each head has a separate break glass. So actual risk of water damage is limited unless it’s actually in your property or directly above.

Turned the TVs on late last night. Originally thought it was a film I was watching.

Sadly not. 😥

Sprinklers are the most effective form of active fire protection, but they are not a panacea. Their reliability levels are generally very high, but they can fail. Blocks of flats with sprinkler systems will usually have isolation valves in each flat, and it’s not unknown to find after a fire which the sprinklers failed to control that some tenants had isolated the system in their flat because they were concerned about water damage from a leak or because decorating works had been carried out and they forgot to switch the system back on afterwards.

Moreover it looks like the external cladding on Grenfell Tower was a key factor, and internal sprinkler systems will not control a fire where it is the exterior of the building that is ablaze. Residential sprinklers rely on the fire being extinguished at an early stage by just a small number of sprinkler heads. If a large fire on the outside of the building breaks through windows into multiple floors, the sprinkler system will not be able to deliver enough water to all the heads that are triggered on each of those floors, and the fire will continue to grow and spread.

I’m not suggesting that sprinklers should not be retrofitted to buildings like these, but it will still be necessary to ensure that other aspects of fire safety are properly installed/in place and managed/maintained.

A major difficulty for those responsible for conducting fire risk assessments is that it requires skills and knowledge which extend over multiple disciplines, e.g. construction, systems like sprinklers and fire alarms, potential causes of fire and how fires may behave in different circumstances, human behaviour etc., and it is difficult for one person to be an expert in all those fields. If that were not enough, there are limits to the extent to which someone undertaking a fire risk assessment can assess and investigate. So they have to assume that previous building works will have been compliant with the relevant fire safety standards, unless they are some obvious visual indicators that contractors have failed to do the job properly.

There are no easy answers, and no substitutes for good standards of management to ensure that any building works are done safely and that the fire performance of the building is not impaired by such works, and that day to day fire safety is actively maintained, including regular checks and maintenance of all fire safety systems and equipment.

It’s still burning!

On the news now…. crazy.

Lots of combustible stuff in a flat, plastics, settees, beds, flooring etc, all burn and getting enough water into the building, there will be a dry riser, but probably more hoses will be required, then there is the problem of water pressure and mains pressure, also with safety of the fire fighters, working upwards, probably in the dark as the one staircase is internal to the building core.

we do have some contemptible pigs in government.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN3e-aYUusc[/video]

Get those politcial swipes in why don’t you ?