Massive Fire in London High Rise

[jayswin]

Death toll now at 12, unfortunately.

[REDVAN]

This is incredible, I was under the impression that concrete buildings were fairly safe

[Caged Great]

Originally Posted by REDVAN

This is incredible, I was under the impression that concrete buildings were fairly safe

They are. Apparently this one didn't have sprinklers and also apparently they don't in a lot of buildings in the UK because of reasons (cheapness)

[blankall]

Originally Posted by Caged Great

They are. Apparently this one didn't have sprinklers and also apparently they don't in a lot of buildings in the UK because of reasons (cheapness)

They also have a housing crisis that has forced many families into densely packed and low-grade housing.

[GordonBlue]

shocking that the fire could engulf the entire building so quickly.
wonder how much truth is in those blogs. if they are accurate, there is going to be hell to pay.
what a horrible way to go.

[ToewsFan]

Originally Posted by GordonBlue

shocking that the fire could engulf the entire building so quickly.
wonder how much truth is in those blogs. if they are accurate, there is going to be hell to pay.
what a horrible way to go.

Unfortunately, it's probably true, as I've heard stories of this happening in Government subsidized housing projects in Canadian provinces. Same deal. The people who may ahve legitimate complaints and raise them with the housing authority are threatened with eviction many of the time. This tragedy would have never occurred, had the tenants not been from a lower socio-economic standing.

[afc wimbledon]

Death toll is going to be around a hundred in the end, 30 already accounted for but 70 missing.

Culprit appears to be an aluminium paneling installed as an insulator on the outside of the building, in order to save around 10,000 dollars they installed the cheaper non fire resistant variety.

[InglewoodFan]

The market should have saved those people. Or something. The article is a kind of all over the place.

As a sometimes fire protection engineer (not for buildings), the whole idea of putting a cost-benefit on lives is to me reprehensible. My projects start at the assumption that everyone goes home safe, and then decisions are made on the value of assets vs cost and risk of active fire fighting and passive protection measures. Rating a risk as potential fatality means go back to the drawing board to eliminate that risk.

[SebC]

Originally Posted by InglewoodFan

The market should have saved those people. Or something. The article is a kind of all over the place.

As a sometimes fire protection engineer (not for buildings), the whole idea of putting a cost-benefit on lives is to me reprehensible. My projects start at the assumption that everyone goes home safe, and then decisions are made on the value of assets vs cost and risk of active fire fighting and passive protection measures. Rating a risk as potential fatality means go back to the drawing board to eliminate that risk.

So your market has already roughed out the calculation, before you start. That's fortunate. It does not mean that the calculation does not occur. It does, and should.

However, the article does make one statement that should be contentious.

"When it comes to many regulations, it is best to leave such calculations of benefit and cost to the market, rather than the government. People can make their own assessments of the risks, and the price they’re willing to pay to allay them, rather than substituting the judgment of some politician or bureaucrat who will not receive the benefit or pay the cost."

Most people do not have the expertise required to properly assess regulatory trade-offs, nor do they have the means to verify compliance. A world in which consumers are expected to assess how likely everything they buy is to kill them would be an extremely taxing one to navigate.

[Regorium]

Originally Posted by InglewoodFan

The market should have saved those people. Or something. The article is a kind of all over the place.

As a sometimes fire protection engineer (not for buildings), the whole idea of putting a cost-benefit on lives is to me reprehensible. My projects start at the assumption that everyone goes home safe, and then decisions are made on the value of assets vs cost and risk of active fire fighting and passive protection measures. Rating a risk as potential fatality means go back to the drawing board to eliminate that risk.

Do you follow governmental standards and regulations? If you do, then you've already inherently accepted the price that the standards board has put on a life when they generate their codes.

Do you follow your own company's standards and regulations? Somebody in your company has done those risk calculations. It might not be you doing it, but it's already been done.

Elimination of risk is impossible, especially for larger scale projects. Prudent risk analysis provides the highest level of safety for everyone involved with the resources available.

[Peanut]

I keep reading the news about this because I find it incredibly upsetting that a fire of this scale and magnitude can still happen in a first world, well regulated, safety conscious country. Just a huge gap in the fire codes allowing this type of cladding on structures. There's been lots of fires in the Middle East related to this aluminum cladding + insulation combo.

I just find it too horrifying for words to imagine a scenario where a parent makes a choice to drop their child(ren) from 10+ stories up to almost certain death, in order to save them from the certainty of burning to death. Unbelievable.

[snootchiebootchies]

This British fire protection expert thinks it is the polyethylene that is sandwiched between aluminum sheeting that exacerbated the fire (and the absence of a sprinkler system). Firefighters could not put out the fire because the fire was sandwiched between the metal sheets.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/london-...pert-1.4163560

Q: In your opinion, what happened?

There was an initial source of fire. That cause is entirely irrelevant to what happened later. What happened is the fire got out of a flat, maybe from an open window or through a broken window from the heat. And then it started heating the panelling and the insulation above. That then set a chain reaction in which the panel started to burn.

The panels being aluminium, melt at 600 degrees [Celsius] or thereabouts. But the fire brigade cannot put out any of the fires behind these panels, because there's metal there. You also have a wind tunnel effect sucking the flames up the wind tunnel, up between the insulation and the external cladding, melting the solid polyethylene above, and continuing the fire right up the height of the building."

The cladding system is combined polyaluminum sheets with a filler of polyethylene. And that is what has caused the problems, because the polyethylene melts at a very low temperature and it catches fire. It is basically like a candle which is sandwiched between two sheets of metal.

We have seen those fires before. There was one in 2014 in Melbourne, Australia, but those didn't enter the flats, because I understand the flats were sprinklered. In Britain, we didn't have these flats sprinklered, and therefore the fire was able to enter the flats quite rapidly.

[You Need a Thneed]

The Panelling might have been a big reason for the fire, but people died because of the lack of sprinklers.

When was this building built, and were sprinklers not part of the fire code at that time? I find that insane.

[You Need a Thneed]

Originally Posted by InglewoodFan

The market should have saved those people. Or something. The article is a kind of all over the place.

As a sometimes fire protection engineer (not for buildings), the whole idea of putting a cost-benefit on lives is to me reprehensible. My projects start at the assumption that everyone goes home safe, and then decisions are made on the value of assets vs cost and risk of active fire fighting and passive protection measures. Rating a risk as potential fatality means go back to the drawing board to eliminate that risk.

Putting a cost benefit on lives is pretty much exactly what a building code does.

We are getting the the point where that cost per live saved is almost ridiculously high.

We literally spend millions of dollars on buildings these days making it so that people can escape safely even in the worst case scenario, and those worst case scenarios are essentially impossible to happen because of the design of the building.

I honestly think in buildings built under current code, there could be a fully involved fire in one suite, and people on a different floor might not even realize anything was happening through extinguishment other then the alarms going off. And Sprinklers would almost certainly take care of a fire before it could fully involve a suite.

Eliminating deaths caused right at the immediate cause of the fire might be extremely difficult to fully eliminate. "Collateral" deaths are essentially impossible, and yet the code keeps adding more things to be done.

[TheFlamesVan]

Originally Posted by Peanut

I keep reading the news about this because I find it incredibly upsetting that a fire of this scale and magnitude can still happen in a first world, well regulated, safety conscious country. Just a huge gap in the fire codes allowing this type of cladding on structures. There's been lots of fires in the Middle East related to this aluminum cladding + insulation combo.

I bolded the main issue here, they are waaaaayyyy behind Canada and the US in fire regulations.

I still can't believe a high rise built in the 70s only had ONE STAIRWELL! Insane.

[TheFlamesVan]

Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed

I honestly think in buildings built under current code, there could be a fully involved fire in one suite, and people on a different floor might not even realize anything was happening through extinguishment other then the alarms going off. And Sprinklers would almost certainly take care of a fire before it could fully involve a suite.

Sprinklers are of huge importance. We've been pushing them in the industry for decades, and will continue to make them more commonplace. What you said is correct, almost every fire is handled by 1 sprinkler as the fire begins. They are incredibly reliable and effective. The hardest part is getting people to look passed all the Hollywood sprinkler scenes and accept that a bit of water damage is nothing compared to a fully involved fire (and that only one sprinkler head opens at a time).

[Tsawwassen]

Sadly, the number just keeps on rising.

"The death toll was first given as 12, before being revised up to 17, then 30, then 58."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/london-highrise-fire-police-say-79-people-are-dead-or-missing-1.4166928

[speede5]

Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed

Putting a cost benefit on lives is pretty much exactly what a building code does.

We are getting the the point where that cost per live saved is almost ridiculously high.

You should see how high that cost is in aviation, particularly military aviation. 100% aircraft reliability is very expensive.

[Tsawwassen]

Grenfell Tower fire started in fridge freezer, cladding failed safety tests: officials
Police are considering criminal charges, including manslaughter

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/grenfell-tower-fire-cause-1.4174576

[Smartcar]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/w...ndon-fire.html

Promising to cut “red tape,” business-friendly politicians evidently judged that cost concerns outweighed the risks of allowing flammable materials to be used in facades. Builders in Britain were allowed to wrap residential apartment towers — perhaps several hundred of them — from top to bottom in highly flammable materials, a practice forbidden in the United States and many European countries. And companies did not hesitate to supply the British market.

The facade, installed last year at Grenfell Tower, in panels known as cladding and sold as Reynobond PE, consisted of two sheets of aluminum that sandwich a combustible core of polyethylene. It was produced by the American manufacturing giant Alcoa, which was renamed Arconic after a reorganization last year.

Arconic has marketed the flammable facades in Britain for years, even as it has adjusted its pitch elsewhere. In other European countries, Arconic’s sales materials explicitly instructed that “as soon as the building is higher than the firefighters’ ladders, it has to be conceived with an incombustible material.” An Arconic website for British customers said only that such use “depends on local building codes.”

The really sad part is the original facade before the renovation last year was concrete and noncombustible.