Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

Similar to the Grenfell Tower fire in Uk, where over 70 people burned alive. The residents warned that the building was unsafe, fire inspector warned it was unsafe, yet nothong was done. Now investigation is 4 years in and it has been an endless processions of code violations, cost cutting, lost building plans (the company told the court that intern deleted them) and outright fraud by the company that produced cladding to mark it as firesafe when it wasn't.

This prompted a review of many building across UK, and lo and behold, thousand or so buildings in UK have massive structural and fire safety defficiencies. Remediation works go anywhere from 25%-75% of original property cost.

The best part is, the builders are not on the hook, the building owner is not on the hook, the management company is not liable, but a leaseholder that bought 25% of the apartment is responsible for 100% of the bill to put things right. Those properties are unsellable, and have become a toxic asset.

> lost building plans

That's pretty wild. I thought city halls had copies of all building plans from when they were submitted for permit approval.

In the UK the local council (town hall) only holds the plans relevant to making planning decisions, not the detailed construction plans. Private companies can sign off the building safety (known as building control) usually as part of providing a new build warranty on the development (but then one of the biggest providers, Zurich, offloaded their portfolio to a shell company than then went bankrupt under the liabilities due to incorrectly signing off buildings. The whole situation is a major scandal in the UK at that moment)

I thought so too

https://www.itv.com/news/london/2020-09-14/grenfell-files-lo...

"Similar to the Grenfell Tower fire in Uk"

No it isn't quite the same. I recently had a look at the docs about Grenfell. That's here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/aluminium-composite-material-cla...

I haven't quite got to the bottom of whether the standards relating to fire was broken or whether the guidance for builders had a hole in it that allowed for what we now know as sub standard cladding.

The unquiry is still ongoing, but firstly the fire safety ceritifucate was forged, as second its not just the cladding, there were missing firebreaks, no evacuation route for disabled people, not functioning fire alarms and smoke extraction and countless other issues in the bulding - if it was just cladding half the residents wouldn't have coocked alive

https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/news/grenfell-contracto...

My point was about whether the standards themselves were wrong.

You mention that the fire safety cert. was forged, they missed out firebreaks and there was a lack of escape routes. Also inadequate alarms and several other failings.

That is "just" crass negligence (dangerous and as it turns out massively fatal, negligence)

My point is that there also seems to be a possible systemic failure. There seem to be a few document releases since the disaster, of updates to standards. That implies that the standards themselves were inadequate and that is also a problem.

> The best part is, the builders are not on the hook, the building owner is not on the hook, the management company is not liable, but a leaseholder that bought 25% of the apartment is responsible for 100% of the bill to put things right. Those properties are unsellable, and have become a toxic asset.

Not insurers? Or the owners aren’t required to carry insurance?

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