Why Grenfell Tower Burned: Regulators Put Cost Before Safety
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There's nothing wrong with naming specific regulatory requirements that you believe are onerous. But repeating the generic attack on any and all regulations is just a populistic attempt to hollow out the power of government, and leads to such disasters, and many smaller injuries to people, property, or the environment that don't get this sort of publicity.
A 2005 law known as the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety)
Order ended a requirement for government inspectors to
certify that buildings had met fire codes, and shifted
instead to a system of self-policing. Governments adopted
slogans calling for the elimination of at least one
regulation for each new one that was imposed, and the
authorities in charge of fire safety took this to heart.It's important to remember that in many matters, the government are the people.
The set of people who object to, and I quote, "any and all regulations," endquote, is an extremely small subset of the electorate.
No. Whosoever built the firetrap and chose this cladding is primarily at fault.
The regulators are secondarily at fault, for allowing it.
Arconic is also secondarily at fault, for selling a cladding material that they are required in several nations to warn against using on tall buildings, but did not warn against in the UK.
Leading with "it's all the fault of those laws that allowed us to do it" is asinine.
I'de always assign blame and disgust on the avoider or the tower builders/designers, since they are the entities that are _actively_ choosing to cause utter catastrophic social damage to their neighbors around them for cash.
But of course, both of these kind of things are set up to be as unaccountable as possible so that once everything hits the fan, you're left with no certain names, no figures, but instead just an unfortunate outcome for those affected and a vague non-court-withholding knowledge of who or what is responsible.
In this tower case, everybody knows that it goes right up to the council (who are always involved in these poverty estates), the builders who obviously knew of the dangers, etc. etc., but you'll never hear any names, or any specific group, just a nebulous cloud of blame that enables the perpetrators to carry on as if nobody died or no tax was avoided.
Such is humans and life.
The industry knows how to not build a 70 m matchstick.
This is clearly not a case of "but we didn't know!" / "who would think of that happening".
"Mr. Adam had seen posters hung by the management company telling tenants to shut their doors and stay inside in the event of a fire. But Mr. Adam, his wife, his daughter and his pregnant sister ignored the instructions and ran. "Anyone who listened to the fire brigade and stayed where they are, they lost their lives."
If you're consistent, I expect you think the fire brigade is only secondarily at fault for the crap instructions? It was the people's fault for following the crap instructions?
Regulations are a device for division of labor and education. They exist partly to tell us what to do so we don't have to understand everything from first principles.
The way the system is supposed to work, fires are contained within individual flats, or a small number of them.
The cladding allowed the fire to spread in a way that undermines this system.
I've been involved in a few minor disasters in 15-25 story high rises. One was a roof fire, another was a kitchen fire halfway up, another was a catastrophic leak of water and glycol from the heating system, and the last was a thick cloud of smoke from a nearby oil-fired power plant that suddenly shutdown during the blackout in 2003. Guess what? There were catastrophic fuckups in every event (fire alarm failure, water pressure failure, firefighters sent to the wrong place, etc). But the SOP was always the same regardless of the situation -- stay in place.
At the risk of admitting to being a selfish asshole, I'll come out and say -- fuck that. I will be bugging out, and I'll tell anyone I know to do the same. I'd rather die trying to get out than getting trapped like the poor souls in this building or WTC.
Business-friendly governments in Britain — first under Labor and then under the Conservatives — campaigned to pare back regulations. A 2005 law known as the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order ended a requirement for government inspectors to certify that buildings had met fire codes, and shifted instead to a system of self-policing. Governments adopted slogans calling for the elimination of at least one regulation for each new one that was imposed, and the authorities in charge of fire safety took this to heart.
“If you think more fire protection would be good for U.K. business, then you should be making the case to the business community, not the government,” Brian Martin, the top civil servant in charge of drafting building-safety guidelines, told an industry conference in 2011, quoting the fire minister then, Bob Neill. (“Should we be looking to regulate further? ‘No’ would be my answer,’” Mr. Neill added.)
Mr. Martin, a former surveyor for large-scale commercial projects like the Canary Wharf, told his audience to expect few new regulations because the prime minister at the time, David Cameron, wanted to greatly reduce the burden on industry, according to a report by the conference organizers.
Two years later, in 2013, a coroner questioned Mr. Martin about the application of building regulations in the case of another London fire, which killed six people and injured 15 others at a public housing complex called Lakanal House. Mr. Martin defended the existing regulations, including the lack of a requirement for meaningful fire resistance in the paneling on the outside of an apartment tower.
A questioner told him that the public might be “horrified” to learn that the rules permitted the use of paneling that could spread flames up the side of a building in as little as four-and-a-half minutes. “I can’t predict what the public would think,” Mr. Martin replied, “but that is the situation.”
Moving to a requirement that the exterior of a building be “noncombustible,” Mr. Martin said, “limits your choice of materials quite significantly.”
After the coroner’s report, a cross-party coalition of members of Parliament petitioned government ministers to reform the regulations, including adding automatic sprinklers and revisiting the standards for cladding. “Today’s buildings have a much higher content of readily available combustible material,” the group wrote in a letter sent in December 2015 that specifically cited the risk of chemicals in “cladding.”
“This fire hazard results in many fires because adequate recommendations to developers simply do not exist. There is little or no requirement to mitigate external fire spread,” added the letter, which was first reported last week by the BBC.
Fire deaths per thousand are lower in the UK compared to the US due to fire regulation --which are a result of lessons learned from The Great Fire, on the other hand the materials they used on that building (as well as some other UK blds) are banned in most advanced economies. Additionally, the manufacturer states the cladding should not be used on anything higher than a ladder engine can reach. So while the material is a poor choice in any regard, the builder was egregious in utilizing it on a structure where ladder engines could not reach the highest floors.
There is a palpable anger, all throughout the UK right now, directed against the ruling class. We've all known instinctively that the ruling class don't care about us, but now it's real and painfully visible.
"The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911 was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in US history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers -- 123 women and 23 men -- who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths ...
"Because the owners had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits -- a then-common practice to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft -- many of the workers who could not escape from the burning building simply jumped from the high windows. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Company
Nothing else can get extinguishing agent onto fire faster than a sprinkler system. A room can flash over in a little over two minutes, and not even the best fire brigade can get there that fast. A hundred litres of water per minute per tripped sprinkler head (and sprinklers will have activated well before the room they're in flashes over) puts an end to most fires with extreme prejudice. If the fire hasn't gone out by the time the fire brigade pulls up, the firefighters can hook up their pumps to external connections to the sprinkler network, which will increase the water pressure/flow inside the sprinkler pipes to get more water onto the offending blaze.
This is not newfangled experimental nonsense, this is boring, well-established, and reliable technology. Sprinklers control fires so well, even in unsafe buildings, to the point that some designers neglect passive fire protection -- it's a bad idea to to depend on a single mechanism for critical applications like fire safety since there's always the possibility of the fire sprinkler system being manually turned off or otherwise malfunctioning. Fire deaths in buildings with operating fire sprinkler systems are rare (http://www.nfpa.org/~/media/files/news-and-research/fire-sta...), there's about 80% less fatalities and almost all fatalities in sprinklered buildings are of victims who were present at the location the fire started -- sprinklers can't undo the damage from the event that started the fire.
Most fire deaths are avoidable with century-old technology. It's tragic and depressing to see the never-ending trickle of fire fatalities (punctured by ghastly mass casualty incidents like the Grenfell fire) knowing that around 80% of them would have made it out alive had they been in a building with a functioning sprinkler system. This should be a well-solved problem, for fuck's sake, there's no technical reason why most occupied buildings connected to a municipal water system can't have some bloody sprinklers. Grenfell tower should have had sprinklers, the Triangle Shirtwaist building should have had sprinklers, and it's a failure of society that every building built less than a century ago and connected to municipal water supply doesn't have sprinklers.
The idea was that the tower is almost all concrete, a fire on any one floor shouldn't spread as there is little to burn. The problem is that later modifications to the heating system and the addition of the cladding have changed the design a lot.
In any case, in the past 10 years the consensus has been changing towards it being prudent to just always require sprinklers in high-rise towers. Scotland began requiring them in 2005, and England in 2007, but neither law is retroactive.
Originally it was a safe building, even without sprinklers: there have been many fires (inevitably) over the years in similar buildings which have never spread, because it was impossible for them to do so. Sprinkler systems would have made them safer & perhaps saved individual lives in the past but at no time were entire buildings at risk because of the lack of sprinkler systems, because it wasn’t possible for them to burn.
Unfortunately, covering the building in flammable insulation (!) and even more flammable rain cladding (!!) completely broke this safety case, turning the building into a death trap.
https://www.locallocalhistory.co.uk/schools/preperation/fire...
350 years later we find that the lessons learned by our ancestors have been forgotten.
There is also the matter of the fridge/freezer, the alleged culprit. I am fairly sure that the fire brigade have got that right, you can trace a fire back to the start, much to the frustration of any arsonist! I am glad it was a fridge and not someone smoking or sitting around with candles. However, I am shocked at people's attitude towards leaving the house with appliances on. Washing machines are known to catch fire, as are tumble driers, but people don't care.
I did check the fridge freezer in question to see if it was one of the really stupidly designed ones that have all the gubbins at the bottom rather than the back. Sounds like it was a 'normal' design rather than one of the ones 'specifically designed to catch fire'.
The 'easy burn' fridge/freezer variants don't have the cooling metalwork at the back but at the bottom, with a fan to bring air in through a 4" or so high gap at the bottom of the fridge/freezer. What happens with this design is that the dirt and dust that collects on the floor in the kitchen gets sucked in, for the fans to get completely blocked with debris. If you pull off the plastic and get that dirt out it is like emptying the bag from a vacumn cleaner that nobody has emptied in months/years. Nobody thinks to clean out the bottom of these things so after a few years the whole thing gets replaced - warranty expired, too expensive to 'get the man out' to fix it.
Only if you are handy with a screwdriver and skint would you deduce and fix the problem yourself. By then the fuse has gone from the motor trying too hard to work so it is easy for the 'technically minded' to replace the fuse and be pleased that their ice cream isn't going to melt. To go to the next step and fix the problem that caused the fuseboard to trip (i.e. dust build up) doesn't happen, instead flipping the fuseboard on becomes just a routine thing you do.
I appreciate the action taken in light of Grenfell with Camden council evacuating the towers with the wrong cladding but I think more needs to be done on the fridge/freezer problem, particularly with flawed designs that really are 'built in obsolescence' due to the simple dust build up problem that people just do not know about.
Not alleged: It’s known that this is how the fire started.
The fire was called in by the resident of the flat when their fridge caught fire. The fire service came, put the fire out in the flat and exited the building. Only at that point did they discover that the fire had spread to the outer skin of the building & they had a major incident on their hands.
The problem, I think, is that people don't want to pay, but people want to spend. We want low taxes but high quality public services. We want low taxes but we want high quality social housing.
While the books of a country must be immensely complex, it can be distilled to a very simple money in, money out equation, and when a country is running at a higher money out than money in, you're getting into debt. Cutting this means cutting state funded things, from services to buildings, etc.
It's not right to use dangerous materials, but if we have less money to spend, or if we prioritise things wrongly, things like this will happen.
I'd love someone who really believes in the theories behind austerity politics to explain to me how the postwar boom ever happened -- not just in the USA, but all across the Western world and the Asian Tigers.
I know people like to bang on about running the economy being different from running your household finances but that only goes so far. The UK is already spending 8% of tax revenue just on servicing debt.
The trouble is eventualy that debt needs to be paid off, either through raising taxes or monetisation. Monetisation is bad as it increases inflation. Increasing taxes lowers spending causing smaller economic activity. All we have done is passed a burden off to the next generation.
The second point is that infrastructure supports growth (if done right, there are of course many ways to do it wrong), so just because headline GDP was so-so over the last decade doesn't mean it couldn't be better. Compared to the US, UK growth was rather poor and recovery from the crash has taken forever.
It's rather silly to compare the US to the UK, financial services makes up a larger part of the UK economy than it does in the US so of course we had a greater impact from the financial crisis.
Just as importantly, the demographic pyramid of the 50s looks absolutely NOTHING like today. The vast majority of the population was either working age or younger -- families had 3-4 kids average, we had no pension / medicare / SS liabilities to worry about (not to mention: end-of-life health care was incredibly cheap in comparison to today).
Nobody would be crying for austerity politics if we didn't have a massive population of retirees supported by a wobbly 1.9 fertility rate. It is not comparable to the 50s.
It's a bit muddled in this case because it's public housing, but those are still far removed levels of the government (national vs. municipal). The local governments are just one of many groups of stakeholders who regularly provide input to the regulatory process.
What you're saying becomes true when the latter is in short supply, but when the former is in short supply, something else is happening.
Money is being spent, it's just a question of how. And guess who was in charge of that refurbishment...