According to the BBC the council even offered to pay for the Fire Brigade to station appliances and crew outside the buildings, but the Brigade said it still would not be able to guarantee the residents safety.

It seems they tried desperately to come up with a way of legitimately avoiding evacuating the blocks, which is going to be a major logistical headache and cost the council a lot of money, even if it does get it back at some point from the contractors or even central government.

The problem is that the fire safety of people in these flats is completely dependent upon being able to rely on residents staying put in the event of fire. The moment it is no longer possible to do that and evacuation is essential for all residents in the event of fire, then the single exit stairwells mean that the buildings are inherently unsafe.

Reportedly they also found other problems which aggravated the risk. There’s mention of the insulation of gas pipes going into flats, which I think probably means that the holes made in the concrete walls for the pipes have not been properly ‘fire stopped’. So fire would be able to spread very quickly internally, as well as externally via cladding.

It sounds like this was not a borderline decision: the council probably had no choice.

I rather like the idea of a modern sportsman eschewing these new fangled drugs like EPO and HGH, and doing things the old fashioned way.

GP Mills consumed enough cocaine to kill a man when he smashed the End to End record in 1891[/url].

According to Wikipedia, he was also “an excellent shot, and carried a Colt revolver while training to fend off dogs. He shot five of them.”

Never mind what tyres – what calibre for a Dobermann Pinscher?

I like to cook my own stuff and making the effort means I must have something alcoholic with it. Not always wine but I know it’s too often. Though I draw a line at half a bottle. If not wine, it’s beer, or cider. Something every night.

Why not try wine boxes, so you can have just one glass with the meal, and don’t have to worry about drinking up the rest before it goes off?

Similarly with beer, what are you drinking? If it’s a can or a large 500ml bottle, try switching to the smaller size bottles.

I find with alcohol that a second or third glass is never as good as the first, so there’s less point in drinking more than a moderately small amount, which I therefore try and ‘eke out’ with the meal to maximise the enjoyment of the consumption of the food with alcohol.

Similarly I would not buy cheap alcohol: always prioritise quality over quantity, which means I can afford less of it and want to make it last.

Also someone needs to re-look at evacuation of tower blocks. I remember Arup having done studies around 10 years ago where they determined that the fastest way to evacuate these building was via the lifts. However, that contradicts conventional recommendations.

I’m not familiar with those studies, but I would be very wary of accepting them at face value without independent research. Arup has a vested interest in designing very high buildings, and I suspect that being able to rely on lifts for evacuation allows it to build higher and accommodate more people than if they are required to provide sufficient fire exit stairwells and compartmentation to allow people to evacuate safely under their own steam.

Whether it’s a study or a risk assessment, a classic mistake is to have decided what the preferred outcome should be in advance, which then ‘influences’ the process, potentially fatally, to deliver the desired result.

For example, I once reviewed a fire engineering case prepared by a company which is a leader in the field. It contained an Event Tree Analysis to justify extending travel distances in a hospital corridor. Superficially it was impressive, but the engineer had made a fundamental logical error in the Event Tree, which meant it was wrong. At the end of the day, I did not worry about it because the travel distance was only being stretched slightly from something like 25m to 29m, and the extra few metres should not be a matter of life and death given all the other fire safety precautions in place, but it was an example of how fire safety engineering was used incorrectly to deliver the pre-determined desired result. It was also something that should have been picked up by the Fire Safety Officer who reviewed the plans etc. for Building Control, and I suspect that Fire and Rescue Authorities need more resources to fund more Fire Safety Officers (and more training for them) to enable them to properly undertake their enforcement role, i.e. reviewing designs for new builds and inspecting both buildings under construction and existing buildings.

Offshore platforms use deluge systems with sea water lift pumps giving them in theory an infinite supply of water, provided they can maintain power to the pumps in the event of a fire. Thing is though the systems get tested on a regular basis and have to meet performance standards. They also aren’t without their problems such a leaks etc. So on a residential block of flats you’d need to have relevant standards in place and ensure you can deliver to the standard, plus you’d need to maintain the systems.

Sprinkler systems for blocks of flats are covered by the same standards as for sprinkler systems generally. I don’t know about offshore standards, but the standard for sprinkler systems on ships is a very slimmed down ‘copy and paste’ version of the onshore standard (for example it omits a lot of the detailed requirements for individual sprinkler components to meet relevant standards).

Where at all possible it is far more sensible, cheaper and reliable to not make (residential) buildings out of combustible material in the first place.

Totally agree. Installing sprinklers in tower blocks to provide an extra margin of safety over and above what should already be a safe building due to non-combustible contruction with good fire divisions is one thing. However, if they are to be installed to compensate for combustible construction etc. and are consequently absolutely critical for life safety, then they will cost a lot more, e.g. they will need two pumps (one a diesel in case of loss of electrical power) and two tanks instead of one.

The letter the failed governmnent has sent out to landlords and property managers

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40375200

What strikes me most is that the Government (despite all the expertise it has available to draft that letter and give guidance) is dumping all the responsibility on individual Fire Safety Officers and the Fire Risk Assessors, by failing to give them much clearer guidance and implying that somehow they may be able to conclude that residents can continue to stay in blocks with highly combustible cladding, and that only “In the case of the most serious risk, consideration must be given to moving all residents out of the block until satisfactory remedial work has been done”.

Hopefully there are no more than a few blocks with cladding like that used on Grenfell Tower, but if I were the risk assessor or Fire Safety Officer responsible for them, there is no way I would sign off on the flats being occupied until the cladding was removed, not even if there is a sprinkler system, since it will not stop a cladding fire.

If that were not enough, the BBC is now reporting here that not only as expected does the cladding used on Grenfell Tower fail fire safety tests, but that the insulation used also failed. The insulation was a Celotex PIR product which had previously passed the necessary test to allow it to be used on high rise buildings, as detailed by Celotex on the front page of its own website here[/url]. We don’t know why it failed the latest tests, and it might be due to incorrect installation on Grenfell Tower rather than a fault in the product. I suspect that the Celotex product may have been used much more widely on high rise buildings in the UK than the combustible cladding. The only consolation is that PIR usually burns slowly and does not rapidly spread fire, so providing it has not been overclad with a highly combustible cladding like that used on Grenfell Tower, it should hopefully not present such a severe threat. Even so the Government should be giving clear guidance about this.

I would suggest that these are more of a driver on price inflation than employment opportunities.

A further even bigger driver has been the way that banks and other lenders lent ever larger and larger multiples of salary to people wanting to buy a home, and the role of governments and central banks in setting low interest rates, resulting in a lot of cheap money which went into the mortgage market.

Arguably, just as banks should not lend irresponsibly, so to borrowers should not over extend themselves. However, that fails to recognise the imbalance in the roles played by individuals, who are often desparate to buy a home, especially so in the face of rising prices reducing their buying power, versus a relatively small number of major financial organisations that were able to exploit the situation and governments/central banks that preferred to avoid doing anything to fix the problem.

Add to that distortions in the housing market such as the tax/interest rate advantages that BTL landlords were able to exploit, and the fact that housing as an investment has tax advantages over other types of investment.

I would recommend going to Avebury instead.

I’m in the process safety side, we use them on oil tanks

Sounds like interesting work.

They may keep the residents in the building but change the protocol in the event of a fire from ‘stay put’ to ‘immediate egress’ if the stairwells have been sized correctly to handle the footfall.

The problem with that is if the flats are like Grenfell Tower with only a single exit route. If the Fire Risk Assessment concludes that ‘stay put’ is not viable, then two exit routes (stairwells) are needed, since you have to consider the possibilities that:

– fire starts in the stairwell (e.g. contractors leave materials there or someone discards an old sofa in the stairwell), or
– fire starts in a flat but spreads and breaks through fire resisting doors into the stairwell, or
– the stairwell becomes smoke logged from a fire.

A stop-gap might be too see if the blocks have rooftop water tanks that are big enough to be used for a curtain type deluge system down the outside of the block, but I suspect any retrofit/upgrade to do that will be prohibitively expensive compared to rehoming the occupants and refitting the cladding.

There are two problems with external drenchers:

1. The amounts of water they require are huge. A sprinkler system inside flats will only need a small tank and a small pump because it will be designed to control a fire contained within only a few rooms at most involving a relatively small quantity of combustible material with only a few sprinkler heads operating. A drencher system needs to deliver something like 10mm/min of water to every square metre of wall protected. That’s 10 litres every minute for every square metre, and since you can’t expect the drenchers to extinguish the fire, only to control it and limit its spread, you need a water supply that will provide that for a significant duration. Even if such a system were installed with zones to limit which drencher heads released water, it would still be impractical and cost prohibitive.

2. Drenchers will not control a fire if it is occurring inside panels, like the ACM panels. It might have an effect when the outer sheet delaminates and allows water to reach the burning polyethylene, and similarly when the inner sheet comes away that will allow water to reach the PIR boards behind (if they were contributing to the fire significantly given that they were fire resistant), but another possible problem is that the polyethylene reportedly drips burning droplets when alight, so falling sheets and molten droplets might fall onto the drencher heads (you would need them part way up the building, not just at the roof) and interfere with their ability to spray water.

Could you not rehouns the tenants until the cladding has been removed only, as once it’s gone the fire risk is removed

On the face of it, I think that is what they are likely to have to do.

From that BBC link:

Councils were told to give details to the government about the cladding they used in the tower blocks by Monday.

The Department for Communities and Local Government is then co-ordinating tests on it – with up to 100 able to take place in a day.

100 a day sounds like they are only doing some kind of ‘quick and dirty’ testing, maybe just a small scale surface spread of flame test.

For those tower blocks with the same type of combustible cladding as Grenfell Tower, of which some have already been identified in Camden and Tottenham according to the BBC article, the local authority is going to need to undertake an immediate revised Fire Risk Assessment. I find it difficult to imagine how a new assessment will be able to conclude other than that the fire safety of the flats is not acceptable. Given that it will take months to remove/replace the cladding, that will necessitate immediate rehousing of the tenants, so again we could be looking at people being put up in hotels for months. They might be able to say that only tenants in floors above 18m need be evacuated, since that is the maximum height up to which this cladding would be permitted by Building Regs, but I cannot imagine tenants on the remaining floors being happy to accept that.

I thought General Elections were the biggest drain on political party funds, and that it took them a few years to build up funds again after each GE.

Are all the parties going to be able to fund another campaign if it happens in the next few months, especially the Conservatives? Many potential wealthy donors may not want to back the Conservatives if they look likely to lose, and also they may not donate if they expect to be harmed by Brexit.

Solid PE is used for the core, not expanded foam

Thank you, that explains a lot. I could not understand how the cladding contributed so much to that fire if it was such a thin foam.

With regard to the encapsulation between inner and outer metal sheets, if the two sheets were separate and only bonded together by the polyethylene, then I suspect that the outer sheets delaminated, exposing the whole surface area of one side of the plastic to air/oxygen and to the fire. This particular hazard has been known about for polystyrene composite panels for 25+ years, and even if ACM is much more recent, it would have been clear to manufacturers, specifiers and fire safety professionals involved with ACM that they presented the same risk following the Dubai Hotel fire in 2015. The manufacturers of Reynobond PE themselves state it should not used on buildings above 10m.

I’d be interested to see what document bans it. Doc B mentions insulation and filler materials, so it may come down to interpretation of whether the cladding panels themselves count as either of these items. Some in the industry would argue that they don’t, however BCA and CWCT guidelines recommend against its use

It does look likely that the argument that the polyethylene was not insulation or filler will be used when this finally comes to court, so it might be argued that they have not breached paragraph 12.7.

It looks horribly possible, even likely, that someone involved in the specification for Grenfell Tower concluded that the polyethylene cladding would comply with ADB, either because they were not very experienced and did not have a good understanding of ADB, or worse, because they were experienced/’clever’ and saw a potential ‘loophole’ in ADB. EDIT – And seemingly others, including Building Control, either accepted this without questioning it, or worse they did not notice it.

If this were all that needed to be addressed in the proposed review of ADB, it would be fairly simple, but there are other areas where similar risks and problems likely now exist and will occur more and more with modern methods of construction making extensive use of combustible materials, so the review will need to be far more comprehensive than just considering cladding and tower blocks.

I thought Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi preferred Omega.

Whatever the motives for Corbyn’s statements (and they are not all mutually exclusive), they should be contrasted with Theresa May’s statements, and also her actions, especially so given she is the PM and as the Leader of the Opposition Corbyn has no power and cannot take decisions (and that is probably an extremely frustrating position to be in when faced with the victims of Grenfell Tower).

If Corbyn (or May or any politician) had said that these people must be rehomed in the borough ‘at all costs’, I doubt anyone would have disagreed. So maybe in using the terms requisition or occupy he was being deliberately provocative, e.g. to highlight the difference in his attitude and approach to this issue.

In contrast to Corbyn, May’s statements sound like the Finance Director of a mid-sized corporate. She’s the PM: we don’t want to hear that she’s found £5M from the budget for compensation, we want to hear that X, Y and Z will be done, and that she is going to make sure that they are done.

Confirmation bias.

Very possibly in my case, but do you acknowledge that cuts both ways and you may be guilty of the same?

According to the Telegraph, this is what Corbyn said:

The ward where this fire took place is, I think, the poorest ward in the whole country and properties must be found – requisitioned if necessary – to make sure those residents do get re-housed locally.

It can’t be acceptable that in London we have luxury buildings and luxury flats left empty as land banking for the future while the homeless and the poor look for somewhere to live. We have to address these issues.

An excessive amount of attention seems to have been given to just three words of that whole statement, and more so on one word, rather than the important qualifier, ‘if necessary’.

Corbyn has been a London MP since 1983, so he probably has greater insight and personal experience (from surgeries etc.) than any of us of the extent of the housing shortages and problems of the capital and their impact on people. I suspect that he is, like any ‘good’/effective politician, seeing and using a window of opportunity to raise public awareness of the problems and help to promote a public debate which would hopefully push the current and future governments to act. Politicians have shied away from taking difficult decisions about housing in the UK for the last 40 years, because it’s difficult and there are few votes in it, so if Corbyn does exploit Grenfell Tower to try to change that, some good may come from the disaster.

I don’t think the separate inserts are a good choice for road riding in particular. Because they are flat rather than curved, and have their own frame, that means they not only offer no corrected vision for when looking over your shoulder out of the corner of your eye, but also there is a lot of clutter (insert frame, uncorrected tinted sunglass lens, and then nothing) in the field of view looking out of the corner of your eye.

One nasty surprise near miss when turning right after looking over my shoulder was enough to convince me there and then to buy prescription Oakleys, and I now use contact lenses.

I’m also inclined to wonder whether declining the opportunity would affect a civil claim.

Declining to prosecute would not affect a civil claim, but because the standard of proof in a criminal prosecution is higher than in a civil case (‘beyond reasonable doubt’ vs ‘on the balance of probabilities’), a successful criminal prosecution means that there is then no scope for the third party (or their insurers) to dispute liability and say it was not their fault (because a criminal court has already decided that it is their fault, at least inasmuch as they have committed a driving offence which caused the accident).

If the police have written to you asking you to decide, then presumably they already consider that they have a strong enough case to go to court.

I suffered right shoulder proximal humeral fractures which could be life changing if I’m unable to carry on with my profession.

It sounds like you probably should – or even will have to – make a civil claim for your injury and possibly loss of future earning potential. If so, I imagine it might make things easier/simpler if a successful criminal prosecution has removed any scope for his insurers to deny liability or claim contributory negligence in order to reduce any payout.

Requisitioning / Occupying (ie breaking into) properties is a political dog whistle anti-rich statement. It is in no way shape or form a workable solution to the rehousing problem.

Indeed. I suspect that Corbyn might be saying this because he knows that it is unrealistic/unworkable, but he also knows that in an era of dumbed down political debate limited to sound bites and slogans, he will bring more public attention and debate to this issue by making a deliberately controversial statement. He seems to have learned from the Leave campaign and it’s use of the £350M figure, so you should feel quite pleased about the way political debate is evolving in the UK.

You’re perfectly happy to take a broad brush to your arguments, whilst a little forethought would reveal the situation to be far more nuanced.

I welcome nuance, there’s far too little of it about.

Personally I think the idea of requisitioning/comandeering empty houses of the sort that would normally be let to ultra high net worth individuals is probably a non-starter, and would probably have all sorts of unintended undesired consequences. It wouldn’t surprise me if it were the sort of thing where if it did happen, the property owners would end up benefiting far more from government compensation than they would lose from any void period.

In being a very upmarket property let out to ultra high net worth individuals, your friend’s house is something of an outlier (although less so in those areas), but even so it occupies land of which there is a limited supply, and a general move in tax policy to discourage long term empty lets would still respect his ownership rights, but might cause him to lower his prices a bit to the point that the less well off members of Take That could afford a couple of weeks’ stay. More importantly it could reduce the number of long term empty homes generally, which is what matters in the face of a general housing shortage.

I agree with Teamhurtmore about the importance of governments respecting property rights, but it seems to me that many property owners see that as synonymous with ‘respecting’ the asset and investment values of their property. And ‘respecting’ in that sense really means protecting, or rather favouring, them to the detriment of others, such as the poor, those in social housing, the young, first time buyers etc.

So rather than try to flower-up any of my comments, I’ve laid them out ‘unsweetened’. Mainly in response to Slowster’s assertion that there were no right-leaning opinions being posted.

It’s quite nice to see that my cat landed amongst the pigeons though!

Well, thank you for posting, but I referred to ‘coherent detailed arguments’, and as the various replies to your posts demonstrated, you hadn’t really properly thought through some of your arguments, especially this one:

And as far as empty properties are concerned, they’re empty because the growth in value is sufficient that they don’t need to be inhabited.

Just because something is a rational financial decision for an investor, that doesn’t mean that it’s something that society considers acceptable. And FWIW, I think it’s perfectly possible for government to address this while respecting and preserving property rights. Obvious examples would be to increase the amount of both public and private sector homebuilding which would increase supply, and to use the tax system even more to discourage empty lets.

Like others, Slowster, I believe that inaccurate comments should be challenged. HTH

FWIW, My earlier comment made direct reference to the importance of property rights and hence was an indirect reference to the work of Hernando de Soto, and economist that I have been lucky enough to share a forum with in the past. You may wish to google him as he has devoted a lot of time to the issue of addressing poverty and homelessness in developing economies, a subject close to my heart. Alternatively you can follow the example of others above and sneer instead. Your choice…..

Thank you for the reply. I’ve only googled briefly, but the comments I’ve read suggest that Hernando de Soto’s work has been on property rights of the poor in developing countries, i.e. stating that their occupation of shanty housing and (presumably black market?) economic activity should be recognised as legal ownership, because that will help to take them out of poverty and property rights are essential to developed economies and societies.

I’m not sure that that is a great argument for defending the property rights of some extremely wealthy investors in a developed society, where the property in question is an essential for human life and is in limited supply both because land for building is physically finite vs a growing population and also because planning laws/govt. policy etc. have restricted growth in supply of housing.

Beginner’s error to confuse libertarian sympathies with being right wing. Different things.

I realise there are both libertarian and authoritarian strands in both the left wing and the right wing, although it seems to me that sometimes these are ideological positions which conveniently suit personal prejudice.

There has to be a balance between letting the market decide and not interfering in people’s lives vs. intervention. Housing seems a case point: something in limited supply which is essential to everyone, which has been allowed/encouraged by successive governments to become a major social and economic problem. If you do not consider yourself right wing, but libertarian, then what is a libertarian solution?

How odd, why would I want to?…Hence can’t be bothered. HTH.

Because simply making pithy comments from a position of superior knowledge and relative wealth and comfort adds nothing to the conversation, and ultimately is little more than trolling. Why otherwise are you taking part in the conversation?

Even allowing for the supposed left wing bias on this forum, it’s surprising to me that there are not more some posters who can present coherent detailed arguments for the more right wing end of the spectrum. I appreciate STW is only an internet talking shop for a relatively small demographic, but I would have expected it to include some people who both could and would want to take the time and trouble to articulate their reasons for a particular right wing viewpoint.

It seemed to me Teamhurtmore evidently could do so if he had wanted, but could not be bothered and preferred instead to make comments from a lofty position of superior academic knowledge without going into detail.

I suspect Jambalaya feels an isolated lone voice, but persists because it’s important that the left wing viewpoints should not go unchallenged and simply be accepted as correct, but I cannot recall seeing a clear thorough detailed argument from him, as opposed to short sweeping assertions of belief or viewpoint presented as fact rather than opinion and typically in very simplistic black and white terms, ignoring or rejecting any nuance or balance. Consequently I think he loses credibilty and his posts are counter productive.

See last comment on this thread.

The question of sprinklers is a red herring.

Without the combustible cladding, it is probably certain that fire would not have spread as rapidly and to so many floors, even if lots of the windows had been open. Instead the fire would have spread slowly inside the building, and assuming a 30 minute fire resisting door to the flat where it started, there’s a good chance it would not even have broken out of that flat before the brigade arrived.

The combustible cladding was almost certainly a gamechanger. Moreover, sprinklers cannot be relied upon where there is such cladding: sprinklers will not control an external fire, and an external fire that spreads into many rooms will quickly overwhelm the sprinkler system. The sprinkler system in the hotel in Dubai that suffered a similar cladding fire ran out of water in 15 minutes, and would have been ineffective well before that (by the time it ran out of water so many heads had already been activated that they would have been delivering only trickles of water).

It is possible that a sprinkler system might have stopped the fire in Grenfell Tower in the flat where it started, but even if sprinklers had been installed, with that cladding on the building it would still be the case that there would be an unacceptable level of risk, because there would always be the danger of a fire involving the cladding, whether because it started close to an open window and spread to the cladding before a sprinkler head in the room was activated, or because it started outside the building – such as a waste bin fire – and spread to the cladding.

If sprinklers had been installed in addition to the cladding, it would still have been playing russian roulette with the lives of the residents, given the consequences of any fire that spread to the cladding.

The political fallout from and public reaction to the Grenfell Tower fire will probably mean that a political decision is taken to retrofit sprinklers in more residential building, which would be no bad thing, but the most important outcome will nevertheless probably be better/more reliable enforcement of the existing prohibition on combustible cladding and possibly – depending upon the results of fire testing – tightening the Regs to prohibit even the fire resistant versions of plastic insulation being used in cladding for high rise buildings.

@mrmo, thank you again. It never occurred to me that there might be a technical reason for the microrib finish – every day’s a school day. As for the ACM PE core, I presume that would be cheaper than the aluminium honeycomb core used by Corus.

3mm or 4mm of expanded PE foam, even over all the external walls, seems relatively little: I would have expected it to burn intensely and rapidly spread fire through the panel, but also to be consumed very quickly. As you say, it may be its interaction with the PIR boards behind that is key to this, which will require a lot more investigation and probably large scale tests to simulate the fire. That is going to take time. In the meantime local authorities in the UK are currently checking the cladding on their tower blocks, but presumably all they know to check for at the moment is that none have PE core cladding.

Lots of confusion in this thread on what is insulation and what is cladding.

My fault, apologies for that – I’m more used to cladding panels that do provide insulation.

ACM does not attempt to provide any insulation properties. The PE core is a structural part of the panel and at 3mm thick is not designed to provide any insulation.

I’m genuinely curious: why is PE used as opposed to PIR, PU or other materials?

Mrmo, thank you.

Without further information this is going to be hard to guess, but that may be a PIR material you are seeing, and it is the polyethylene ACM skin that acted like a candle wick.

Looking again I think you’re right. So those are the remains of the foil faced Celotex PIR insulation boards affixed to the spandrel panels, and the outer ACM panels completely detached from the building. I have never seen polyethylene insulation in a panel, and visual identification of many types of insulation is often difficult, i.e. PU, PIR and phenolic are often a similar yellow colour.

They will doubtless be assessing whether the Celotex contributed significantly to the fire (it’s supposed to be slow burning, but as you say the heat from the burning polyethylene may have acted to accelerate combustion of the Celotex, especially if there was an air gap behind the ACM panels that acted as a flue). However, the fact that there are virtually no remains of the ACM panels suggests that the polyethylene insulation was the main contributor. Looking at Google images of polyethylene foam, it looks like it can have a very open cellular structure, which would probably result in very rapid fire spread from one end of the panel to the next.

I think, this is actually quite common, from memory, this is not neccessarily insulation but a core within the skin of the material. As mentioned Ash and Lacy for one use an Aluminium composite material (ACM) to make there facade, an insulation layer that can be glass or mineral can then be used as insulation.

That’s interesting. I see the Ash & Lacy panels meet Class 0, but they too presumably do not meet the requirements for ‘Materials of Limited Combustibility’ as required by Approved Document B for building heights over 18m.

Given the nature of the external fire at Grenfell Tower, I suspect the market for polyethylene cored panels in UK construction projects has now vanished. Even if it’s permitted by Building Regs for buildings below 18m, insurers are likely to make it clear to their commercial sector and public sector customers that such panels should not be used.

It’s looking like the key cause of the severe external fire was the specification of a composite panel which did not meet Building Regs.

It looks like the French manufacturer produces some panels (with a polyethylene insulation core) which do not meet the relevant European fire standard specified in Approved Document B. I’m surprised that it would even make sense to manufacture such panels, since there is probably very little market for them in Europe, but the panels fitted to the Dubai hotel which suffered a major fire were also polyethylene cored, so maybe there is a large market outside Europe which explains why they manufacture them.

I’ve never heard of polyethylene cored panels being used in the UK before, and the likes of Kingspan invariably use polyisocyanurate (PIR). Moreover, not only will the UK panel manufacturers’ panels probably all meet the European or BS476 standard, most of them will meet the even more stringent standard required by insurers (LPCB Approval).

Someone in the chain responsible for the refurbishment contract, whether the specifier, the tenderer, the supplier etc. screwed up. I very much doubt it was deliberate cost cutting by the council or fraud by the supplier (supplying a cheaper product instead of a more expensive one). Rather I suspect carelessness, combined probably with a council/contractor ordering products from a foreign manufacturer’s range whose products are not widely used in the UK and with whose range of products people are not familiar (whereas they would likely know which precise model of Kingpan panel was required without even looking it up).

The fact that the wrong panels could be ordered is still only part of the story: we should not have a system where a simple mistake like that could go without being picked up at some point, e.g. review of the specification, review of the tender, checking the products delivered at the site etc. Kingspan composite panels are labelled with the model no. and whether they are LPCB Approved on the edge of each panel.

You can see the blackened charred polyethylene foam in the panels where the outer metal skin has delaminated in this BBC photograph:

Some building have whats called a fire drench system , water is held in the system and can be released on command from a central control panel, unlike sprinklers which can be isolated or go off in a case of vandalism or a real fire.

As the fire spread externally an external fire drench system could have been fitted, as was fitted to the saudi tower block fire a few years ago.

Drencher systems are usually only suitable in very specific applications providing protection to a relatively small area, usually in the high hazard industries, e.g. chemical plants etc. They are not suitable for protecting whole buildings or even large areas of buildings.

Sprinkler systems work by having only a relatively small number of heads activated directly over the fire, thus controlling the fire at an early stage before it has grown too large. Consequently a sprinkler system in a residential building only needs a relatively small tank and and pump, because the water demand is not that high. Drencher systems require large tanks and bigger pumps, which are both expensive and more difficult to accommodate in a building in a retrofit. A drencher system on the outside of Grenfell Tower would simply not be possible/viable. In any case, even if one had been installed, the external fire was either inside the cladding insulation or behind the cladding, and the water from a drencher system would not have reached the fire.

Labour passed a law in 2007 requiring all high rise new build to have sprinklers, why not existing buildings ?

One of the drivers for the legislation being passed was probably the changes in construction methods that have increased in recent years. In other words there are greater risks with some of the more modern design techniques and materials compared with the past. The potential for hidden fire spread in cavities in modern buildings using lots of lightweight materials is a huge concern.

In contrast 1960s and 1970s brutalist reinforced concrete tower blocks are inherently simpler and safer in design: each of the flats is separated by substantial fire resisting walls, not plasterboard (or worse, plasterboard backed with polystyrene insulation) with a cavity in between which may extend God knows how far through the rest of the floor or even to other floors.

The problem is that modern materials and techniques were used to clad Grenfell Tower, and it looks almost cetain that without those there would not have been anywhere near the same loss of life. The big question is whether the cladding and its installation was compliant with Building Regs. If it was then retrospective legislation will be needed to require all such cladding to meet new fire standards.

you have to look at the insurance industry here as they tend not to like sprinklers.

This is completely untrue. Insurance companies always support and encourage the installation of sprinklers. Please do not post factual untruths like this because spreading this sort of thing makes it harder for people in the fire safety industry to persuade businesses, politicians and the public of the right course of action.

Insurance companies could not be more in favour of sprinkler systems: they discount their prices very steeply for sprinklered vs non-sprinklered buildings, and the greater the risk (both in terms of the financial value of property at risk and the hazardous nature of the occupation), the more likely it is that an insurer will insist on sprinklers.

This is because they can be set off accidentally (or deliberately) and can cause a lot of damage if they do, which the insurers then have to pay out for

Insurance companies do provide Sprinkler Leakage cover as standard for sprinklered buildings, and the amount that they notionally allocate of the insurance price for this cover is absolutely peanuts and only a small fraction of the amout of discount that they give for having the sprinklers.

Sprinklers can cause damage if activated accidentally, but this is rare: good design and maintenance and good operational management will greatly reduce that risk, and in those exceptional circumstances where it is ‘essential’ to a business that sprinkler water does not contaminate their goods etc., the system can be designed with failsafes which prevent water entering the pipework unless their is a fire.

if both the insurers and building control insisted on them in all multiple occupancy buildings, then weasle developers and landlords won’t be able to duck their responsibilities.

It is not for insurance companies to be the arbiter for society of when sprinklers should be installed for life safety purposes. All that insurers do is pay out money, and it would be wrong for a decision that needs to be taken by politicians and society (informed by experts) to be taken instead by insurers based simply on a financial calculation. Moreover, even with property protection there are variations between different insurers as to when and whether sprinklers are essential. Because markets change, insurers also vary those decisions: if there is a lot of competition for business in some years, not only do prices drop, but also the insurers will accept some risks without sprinklers that they previously would not. The installation of sprinklers for life safety cannot be taken by insurers, because that would turn it into a purely commercial financial decision, which would be wrong.

the old one never smells fresh no matter how many times I wash it

I’ve read that a solution to this is to add some white vinegar to the wash. Apparently the bacteria that produce the smells are not removed from the fabric or killed by ordinary washing liquids.

For a lot of people working in public sector jobs that don’t pay high salaries, such as the NHS, job centres, social services, housing etc., being on the receiving end of people’s anger, fustration and anguish in highly emotionally charged situations is part and parcel of the job.

For Theresa May, the elected leader of the country, to avoid meeting the residents, possibly because she knows she is poor at dealing with ordinary people, is an utter disgrace. She needed to realise (and her advisors needed to tell her) that this is not about her, and that it’s her job to damn well get out there and listen to some of these people. If she were to receive an Alex Ferguson style hairdryer speech from some of them, that’s just tough and goes with the job, and if something like that had happened, it would have been a momentary unpleasantness for her and I think the country would have respected her for letting people vent their anger and frustration on her. The security concens could easily have been addressed by having the meeting indoors (and away from the media cameras – not for her benefit but out of respect for the victims who do not deserve to be a sideshow for the press).

She is not fit to be Prime Minister.

According to the Wiggle reviews, the cups are Shimano spline fit (the Campag brand BBs require a Campag spline tool which is the same one as for their cassettes).

What brand of tool are you using, e.g. Shimano or Park?

I think this fire will have a far greater reaching impact on how we manage fire safety in the UK than any previous major fire/catastrophe, such as Bradford Football Ground and Kings Cross.

I say this partly because it has happened in the internet age. The public no longer have no choice but to wait to receive their information about the incident from newspapers or the BBC, whose journalists lack the technical knowledge to be able to comment themselves and who will be dependent on whichever (differing) expert they speak to, and who also are automatically biased towards sensationalism, finding a scapegoat and partisan political point scoring. The ability to share information and knowledge via the internet means that it’s much harder for politicians and experts to ‘control the narrative’ and to avoid possibly uncomfortable facts.

This and the sheer scale of loss of life means that politicians will be more willing and able with public support (and be more forced) to consider making some very difficult but very worthwhile changes to how we manage fire safety. For example, it’s fairly easy to change Approved Document B and make new requirements about cladding materials, but if a key problem is builders and others breaching regulations, then that is going to be a lot harder to address because we need to stop it happening rather than relying on the threat of possible prosecution only if later on there is a fire and it’s discovered that the contractor broke the rules. Substantially reducing the frequency and likelihood of breaches occurring in the first place would probably mean a major increase in expenditure on building control inspections. Similarly I think this event could/should result in greater resources for the Fire and Rescue Authorities to undertake their existing enforcement role. That might mean that they spent much more time on an inspection, reviewing a building’s fire safety in much greater detail than before (e.g. witnessing tests of the fire alarm or sprinkler system etc.).

The other benefit of the internet is that by sharing knowledge and experience, everyone can become better informed, whether they are the occupant of a flat, a builder, a property manager or whatever.

If breaches of the regulations do prove to have been a major factor at Grenfell Tower, I would point out that this is not something particular to social housing for the less well off (counter to the narrative being spun by some that the fire would not have happened if the people living in Grenfell Tower were well off). This link may not work, but it includes a presentation by a specialist fire contractor, Sharpfibre, detailing the very poor quality fire stopping they were called in to remediate at an upmarket modern block of flats in London. It’s the sort of thing that needs to be disseminated much more widely, because it helps everyone to know what good practice looks like, and to spot what is likely to be bad practice.

Incidentally I went to a seminar by a company called iMist a couple of weeks ago. Look them up – interesting product and retrofitable to your house. Go on – do it…. let me know how many of you get it installed. It could save your life.

And this is precisely what I mean about ‘experts’ and different opinions and competing technological solutions.

There are major issues with water mist systems, and a lot of cowboys and disreputable salesman are marketing them and selling water mist systems which will not work to ill informed customers, including local authorities. The are being marketed as alternatives to sprinkler systems because they cost a lot less money, but they are not. They do have some very specific uses, e.g. in engine rooms of ships, where they are a suitable form of protection and for which there are recognised design standards based on proper testing for that specific application. In the testing that has been undertaken of water mist systems’ ability to provide general fire protection in an office (which is a relatively low hazard risk) in the same way as a sprinkler system, they failed (I think this was undertaken by the BRE).