Fire engulfs Grenfell tower block in west London

It emerged overnight that ministers were warned numerous times over the cladding that turned the Grenfell Tower into an inferno but ignored the advice of fire experts.
The Home Office was handed a damning report after hundreds of residential tower blocks were surveyed in the 1990s - but did nothing.


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Money aside, don't forget that that damned cladding has been presented for years as 'green' and 'environmentally friendly' because it supposedly reduces heating bills.

Lamplighter wrote:

It was installed on the council-owned Grenfell block in 2015 as part of a £10 million refurbishment by a company which was later liquidated after a firm they were working with refused to pay out in a dispute over their work.

LL

I suspect 'shoddy tarting up' would be a better description than 'refurbishment', LL.

Oh, who sat on the warning reports?

There are fears that hundreds of high-rise blocks across the UK are fitted with similar materials – even though MPs warned of the potential fire risk nearly 20 years ago.
A report in 1999 by the Environment, Transport and the Regions select committee said: 'We do not believe that it should take a serious fire in which many are killed before all reasonable steps are taken towards minimising the risks.'
The MPs highlighted concerns that the air cavity between the layers of cladding can act as a chimney, helping the fire spread rapidly upwards. Their report demanded that 'all external cladding systems should be required either to be entirely non-combustible, or to be proved through full-scale testing not to pose an unacceptable level of risk in terms of fire spread'.

But the method was popular as councils sought to meet insulation standards laid out under the Blair Government's £22billion Decent Homes Programme, which ran from 2000 to 2010. It continued to be used even after the 2009 fire at the 14-storey Lakanal House in Camberwell, South East London, which killed six people.
Sam Webb, a fire safety expert who helped gather evidence after that tragedy, said last night there was a conflict between safety and the materials used to make buildings more energy efficient.
'They are not fire-resistant and in some cases they're flammable,' he said. Fires involving cladding have also occurred in Australia, Russia and the Arabian Peninsula – adding to the serious safety concerns.


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But hey, cladding saves the planet, so it can't possibly be a bad thing....can it?

But the method was popular as councils sought to meet insulation standards laid out under the Blair Government's £22billion Decent Homes Programme, which ran from 2000 to 2010.

As I said earlier, look whose grubby mitts are all over this. Wanna bet the Red Loser will try and blame the current government and screech for the PM to stand down? LL

Every single thing Blair did has turned into sh*t, LL, everything.

The Grenfell Tower inferno shames London. Brendan O'Neill

It takes a lot to make me feel ashamed of London, my beloved home city. But yesterday’s tower-block inferno did it. The raging fire at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, the disturbing speed with which this home to hundreds was reduced to a smouldering shell of a building, heaps shame on this city. It is positively Dickensian, a hellish scene out of place in 2017, like a violent echo from an older era when safety, especially the safety of the poor, was of little moment. London needs to look in the mirror. This cannot just be chalked up to ‘tragedy’.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it was the low social status of the inhabitants of the tower that left them vulnerable to this horror. That’s a serious charge, I know, but how else do we explain that residents who complained about fire hazards were ignored? The Grenfell Action Group residents’ association complained to the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) — which manages Grenfell — about ‘terrifying power surges’ caused by ‘faulty wiring’. It predicted that only a ‘serious fire in a tower block’ would lead to KCTMO being ‘brought to justice’. It remains to be seen how neglectful KCTMO was, if it was at all, but it is profoundly concerning that residents say their complaints were ignored. Their worries ‘fell on deaf ears’, they say. It’s hard to imagine the residents of one of Kensington’s plusher, more pleasing-to-the-eye builds being treated like this.

There are many specific questions that must be asked — and answered — about this horrific fire. Most pressingly: how did a fire in one flat spread with such ferocious speed to the entire block? A flat-based fire can be a simple accident (though we don’t yet know if this fire was accidental or deliberate). But when such a fire moves upwards and upwards with nightmarish intensity, engulfing home after home, it’s not an accident. Then it becomes something else; then it becomes clear that the fire has been enabled by something, perhaps by the decisions and actions of others. In this case, recent refurbishment, including the addition of seemingly flammable cladding, raises serious questions about materials used on buildings and official fire regulations. Also, why don’t all tower blocks have sprinklers? And decent fire alarms that can actually be heard? These specific issues must be pored over, urgently, post this inferno.

But there are broader questions, too. Most importantly, there’s the housing crisis, the dearth of new build, and how this has helped to warp the housing market so that homes in Britain, and especially in London, are pretty much unaffordable to normal people. The failure of both Tory and Labour governments to build the millions of new homes Britain needs has messed up the economy and society in ways we sometimes fail to appreciate. Bank of England governor Mark Carney was right to warn in 2014 that ‘there are not sufficient houses [being] built in the UK’, and that this lack, this dearth, is ramping up house prices, intensifying borrowing, and storing up serious problems for ‘financial durability’.

But the housebuilding failure hasn’t only twisted prices and blown up economic bubbles — it has also had a dire impact on society, too, on community life, even on the value we attach to certain citizens. It has created a situation where developers, and the local councils who love them, tend always to have the super-rich in mind; tend to erect new builds they know will be snapped up by those flush with cash: wealthy foreigners or filthy-rich Brits. In the midst of this market-lighted process of gentrification, the poorer inhabitants of places like Kensington and Chelsea sometimes come to be seen as a pain, as squatters almost, whose towering blocks or state-funded homes are in essence vast concrete barriers to the making of huge amounts of money.

And so do the poorer inhabitants of certain boroughs come to be seen, inexorably, as a problem, as pests, their concerns easily ignored. After all, wouldn’t it be better if they left? If they cleared the way for new opportunities for wealth creation for the few? This is the inhumanity unwittingly unleashed by our warped housing crisis, and by the recession more broadly, and it is, if you will forgive me, disgusting.

Since that benighted building and the family homes it contains went up in flames 24 hours ago, there has been a rush to pin the blame on ‘evil’ individuals. We’ve seen an outburst of Tory-bashing in particular. Boris is to blame, for cutting fire services. Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s new chief-of-staff, is also getting it in the neck for having allegedly ‘sat on’ a report about how tower blocks are vulnerable to fire. This craven search for the one evil Tory to blame for this calamity is also Dickensian. It’s a Dickensian breed of moralism that prefers to bash wicked individual landlords or nasty Scrooges rather than address the bigger social and economic underpinnings of tragedies like this. Finger-pointing and the desire to feel good and pompous become a substitute for examining how both Tory and Labour governments have helped to warp the housing question through their failures of housing ambition.

I was born into overcrowded social housing in West London, not far from Grenfell. So I know something of how social-housing residents are mistreated, how they can come to be viewed as lesser citizens than those with money and influence, whether it’s by Labourites hectoring them for their ‘nasty neighbour’ behaviour or the rich wishing they would move on. It must stop. We have it in our power to ensure that nothing like the Grenfell fire ever happens again, if we ask the right and hard questions.

Thanks, LL, interesting.

Worth noting that, whatever their backgrounds, income or origins, the residents of Grenfell Tower were NOT some kind of feckless, anti-social underclass. They cared about where they were living, their residents' association had been kicking up Hell long before this avoidable disaster.

http://www.standard.co.uk/Front/london-fire-inside-the-2k-grenfell-tower-flats-before-the-blaze-a3565416.html

Quote:

The block contains 120 flats made up of a mix of social housing and also private homes which are sold or rented out by KCTMO.



Photos taken from inside the £1,971 a month flat when it was listed for rent.

It wasn't a rundown slum, and I suspect it was perfectly safe till it was 'improved'. As well as the obvious burning cladding, suspicions are being raised that when work was being done on the gas supply, holes drilled in walls weren't resealed properly, which helped spread the inferno internally.

'Gutter politics' Corbyn bashed for politicising London fire in shock attack on Tories.

Jeremy Corbyn was lambasted for turning the fire at a 24-storey West London tower block into "political point scoring".

The Labour leader has been criticised online after he said the Grenfell Tower fire was the price paid for the government’s cuts to local authority funding.

At least six people have died and 74 have been injured after a fire engulfed the block, near Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd's Bush.

Speaking on LBC to the radio station's political editor Theo Usherwood, the party leader said: "If you deny local authorities the funding they need then there is a price that’s paid by the lack of safety facilities all over the country.

"I think there needs to be some very searching questions asked as quickly as possible in the aftermath of this fire.”

Mr Corbyn’s comments were attacked on social media.

On Twitter, Nora White said: "Scoring political points over the bodies of dead children. What a guy."

Kevin Wingfield was also critical.

He said: "Corbyn jumping on the bandwagon already before the flames are out and before any cause established. Gutter politics."

While Anna Rixson said: "Just shows the integrity of the man."

Omar Ebrahim was also not happy with the comments.

He said: "Not sure now is the time for this. Political point scoring is for later, not now."

An anonymous tweeter added: “What a slimeball! Making political capital out of this terrible tragedy. Corbyn you are sc*m.”

A local community leader, working to locate victims, has claimed "nobody who lived on the top three floors survived" the fire which has destroyed Grenfell Tower on the Lancaster West Estate in North Kensington after starting just before 1am.

He said: "We have a list of missing people - there are so many. It's possible there are more than 50, possibly hundreds."

Six fatalities have been confirmed, but the number is set to increase, and more than 74 people have been taken to hospital, London Fire Commissioner, Dany Cotton confirmed.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/817120/Grenfell-Tower-fire-London-Jeremy-Corbyn-government-cuts-local-authority-funding

The Labour leader has been criticised online after he said the Grenfell Tower fire was the price paid for the government’s cuts to local authority funding.

Imbecile. If the block HADN'T had millions spent on 'improving' it, it almost certainly wouldn't now be a smouldering, corpse-filled ruin.

British PM May Orders Full Public Inquiry Into Deadly Tower Block Fire.

LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May ordered a full public inquiry into the London tower block fire that killed at least 17 people early on Wednesday morning.

"Right now, people want answers and it's absolutely right and that's why I am today ordering a full public inquiry into this disaster. We need to know what happened, we need to have an explanation of this," she said on Thursday.

"People deserve answers, the inquiry will give them."

well, if the labour leader or also the owners of the tower listened the complaints of the residents of the tower, probably that tragedy could have been avoided, but it seems that the tower doesn´t had fire or smoking detectors, also hoses in the walls of the tower near the apartments which could have helped extinguished the fire, also the firemen who were near the tower when the fire was burning had the wrong behaviour of trying to keep the residents of the tower inside their apartments instead of helping them to reach the stairs that would take them far from the tower.

the firemen who were near the tower when the fire was burning had the wrong behaviour of trying to keep the residents of the tower inside their apartments instead of helping them to reach the stairs that would take them far from the tower.

Trouble is, Pedro, that is normally absolutely the correct advice - fires in these blocks are normally confined to one apartment, they were designed that way.

But this time, because the structure of the building had been messed about with, fire and smoke was coming in from the outside as well, which is almost unheard of because concrete doesn't burn - except where the stupid cladding has caught light.

As it was, the fire service got 60+ people out of the stairwell safely.

It was the local council that owned the building, and then palmed off responsibility to a property management firm. London Fire Brigade had already been in dispute with them over their shoddy practises.

My money is on corruption and incompetence being the root cause of this.

Something else - were the heavy fire doors at the stairwell being kept closed? It's not uncommon for residents to get blase about these, and prop them open because it's obviously more convenient, never, ever thinking that it could prove fatal.

That is, of course, a minor thing on top of the whole avoidable chain of disaster, but may have made things even worse than they already were.

http://news.sky.com/story/west-london-fire-live-fire-service-chief-confirms-there-have-been-fatalities-10915010

BREAKING: Met Police commander Stuart Cundy says six of the 17 confirmed victims were found outside the building.

When asked about what he thinks the final death toll might be, he said: "I just don't know. I hope it's not inevitable that it's in triple figures."

====

BREAKING: Six victims of the blaze have been provisionally identified but "there is a risk that sadly we may not be able to identify everybody", Met Police says

Oh Lord. If the victims can't even be identified by DNA, does that mean some apartments were being sub-let and no-one actually knows how many people were in the building?

There's a documentary TV programme where they send in the High Court bailiffs to collect outstanding debts and it's amazing how many of the evictions turn up multiple occupancy with single rooms rented out to up to 5 people.   Sometimes they are used as brothels.    I wouldn't be at all surprised if this might be a fact in relation to Grenfell House.    LL

You keep thinking this horror can't get any worse, and then it does.

the local council that owned the building should have installed those safety measures when he received a warning from the residents of the tower, but he showed no concern about those safety measures. another thing: if a building have no safety measures, how it is allowed to have residents in it. surely that a committee to check thoroughly those safety measures should have been there every month to check those safety measures. if a building don´t have those measures, it should not be granted the license to have residents in it.

Agree 100%, Pedro, the council was warned, and warned, and warned - and they ignored everything. The residents' blogs are all online, begging the council to act before there was a disaster, but nothing happened.

It's going to take a long time to sort this out, but I can see people going to jail for manslaughter for causing this avoidable tragedy.

Breaking news on Sky is that a criminal investigation into the fire has been opened.

Also on Sky - an absolutely horrifying safety test to see what happens if that damned cladding is exposed to flame. Guess what? It goes up like cotton wool.

My friends, take a look at:

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/kctmo-playing-with-fire/

My friends, this was taken from Sky News:

http://news.sky.com/story/grenfell-tower-fire-theresa-may-orders-full-public-inquiry-10916495

The council actually threatened the bloggers four years ago, Pedro:

Grenfell Tower death toll at 17 as hunt for bodies delayed.

The number of people who perished in the Grenfell Tower tragedy is expected to rise, as police warn some victims may never be identified.

Of the 17 people confirmed to have died in the fire, six bodies have been recovered while 11 have been located but cannot yet be removed.

Efforts to recover bodies have been hampered after the blaze that engulfed the 24-storey building in the early hours of Wednesday flared up again on Thursday afternoon.

Syrian refugee Mohammed Alhajali, 23, and artist Khadija Saye, 24, have been named as the first victims of the disaster in west London.

Half of the 30 people who are still receiving hospital treatment are critically ill.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/grenfell-tower-death-toll-17-hunt-bodies-delayed-212500535.html
________________________________
Grenfell Tower fire: Cladding used on block 'was banned in US'.

Reports suggest it would have cost £5,000 extra for contractors to apply a fire-resistant version of panelling to tower block.

Cladding believed to have been used on Grenfell Tower is banned in the US, it has emerged, amid revelations that it would have cost just £5,000 extra for the contractors to apply a fire-resistant version of panelling to the building.

Speculation is growing about the construction of the tower after a blaze ripped through it "like a matchstick" in the early hours of Wednesday morning, killing at least 17 people died and injuring scores more.

It has now emerged that the aluminium panels thought to have been added to the outside of the block as part of a £10 million refurbishment completed in May 2016 are banned in the US on buildings taller than 40 feet for fire safety reasons.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grenfell-tower-fire-latest-london-cladding-banned-us-flammable-a7792711.html
_________________________________
Grenfell Tower fire: Scotland Yard opens criminal investigation into tragedy – latest updates.

Follow the latest updates as police say they expect death toll to rise in wake of Grenfell Tower disaster in west London.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2017/jun/15/london-fire-17-confirmed-dead-as-police-expect-more-fatalities-after-tower-block-blaze-latest