Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

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Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

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http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-40269625

There have been a "number of fatalities" after a huge fire raged through the night at a west London tower block, London Fire Brigade says.

Firefighters are still tackling the blaze at Grenfell Tower in north Kensington, where eyewitnesses reported seeing people trapped inside.

Thirty people are being treated in hospital, says London Ambulance.

The BBC's Andy Moore said the whole 24-storey block had been alight and there were fears the building might collapse.

Eyewitnesses said they saw lights - thought to be mobile phones or torches - flashing at the top of the block of flats, and trapped residents coming to their windows.

The Met Police has set up an emergency number on 0800 0961 233 for anyone concerned about friends or family.
Media captionEyewitness: 'We've seen people blinking lights within the building'

At 06:15 BST, London Ambulance Service said 20 ambulance crews had been at the scene, 30 people had been taken to hospital, but the nature and level of their injuries was not yet clear.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said a "major incident" had been declared.

Three hours after the fire started, police said people were continuing to be evacuated from the tower.
Media captionDavid Benjamin says he was woken by a neighbour banging on the door

Paul Munakr, who lives on the seventh floor, managed to escape.

"As I was going down the stairs, there were firefighters, truly amazing firefighters that were actually going upstairs, to the fire, trying to get as many people out the building as possible," he told the BBC.

He said he was alerted to the fire not by fire alarms but by people on the street below, shouting "don't jump, don't jump".

"Now, honestly I don't know for certain if people jumped off the building to get away from the fire, but the main thing for me with this incident is the fact that the fire alarms didn't go off in the building," he said.

Eyewitness Jody Martin said: "I watched one person falling out, I watched another woman holding her baby out the window...hearing screams.

"I was yelling at everyone to get down and they were saying 'We can't leave our apartments, the smoke is too bad on the corridors.'"

The BBC's Andy Moore said: "We've seen debris falling from the building, we've heard explosions, we've heard the sound of glass breaking.

"The police keep pushing back their cordons, pushing back members of the public for fear the building might collapse."

London Fire Brigade assistant commissioner Dan Daly said firefighters were "working extremely hard in very difficult conditions to tackle this fire".

"This is a large and very serious incident and we have deployed numerous resources and specialist appliances."

London Ambulance Service medics specially trained in life-saving medical care in hazardous environments have also been sent to the fire.

The first reports of fire in the tower, in Latimer Road, on the Lancaster West Estate, came in at 00:54 BST.

Grenfell Tower was built in 1974 by Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council.

It's part of the Lancaster West Estate, a sprawling inner-city social housing complex of nearly 1,000 homes.

Grenfell Tower underwent a two-year £10m refurbishment as part of a wider transformation of the estate, that was completed last year.

Work included new exterior cladding and a communal heating system.

The 24-storey tower, containing 120 flats, is managed by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) on behalf of the council.

The local Grenfell Action Group had claimed, before and during the refurbishment, the block constituted a fire risk and residents had warned that access to the site for emergency vehicles was "severely restricted".

The BBC has been unable to contact the property's management company in the hours since the fire.

One eyewitness, George Clarke, the presenter of Channel 4 TV programme Amazing Spaces, told Radio 5 Live: "I'm getting covered in ash, that's how bad it is.

"I'm 100 metres away and I'm absolutely covered in ash.

"It's so heartbreaking, I've seen someone flashing their torches at the top level and they obviously can't get out."

Jody Martin said he ran towards the building to try and help when he saw the fire.

He said he was shouting at people to "get out, get out" but that residents were shouting back that they were stuck as corridors inside the building were filled with smoke.
'Building crumbling'

Tim Downie, another eyewitness, told the BBC part of the building was "completely burned away".

"It has burned through to its very core," he said.

"It looks very bad, very very bad. I've never seen anything like this. It's just such a big fire.

"The whole building is just crumbling. It's just billowing black smoke."

Safiyah, who is about 500m away from the building, said: "There are lots of people gathered in the street. I just see more and more flames burning and tragically I hear people crying for help.

"The entire building is burning through."

I hope nobody knows anyone in this building, and that whomever they might know got out, because it looks like London may have just had a fire to put all this terrorism bullshit at the bottom of the hole where it belongs. The word from the web is the the building was recently rebuilt with WOOD, had emergency access reduced, and preexisting complaints online say residents were told in event of a fire to stay in their apartments which is beyond insane. People from at least as high as the 18th floor made it out, past that, fatalities are known.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by Alkaloid »

Nothing wrong with rebuilding with wood, necessarily. Depending on how the fire behaves and the type of building it can actually be better than steel structurally because it will hold it's strength longer at high temperatures. I wouldn't think the structural beams in a building this size would be wood though, more likely cladding.

The bigger concern is that all reports so far say that not a single resident to get out heard a fire alarm of any sort go off.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by FSTargetDrone »

Alkaloid wrote:Nothing wrong with rebuilding with wood, necessarily. Depending on how the fire behaves and the type of building it can actually be better than steel structurally because it will hold it's strength longer at high temperatures. I wouldn't think the structural beams in a building this size would be wood though, more likely cladding.

The bigger concern is that all reports so far say that not a single resident to get out heard a fire alarm of any sort go off.
No word about sprinkler/suppression systems in any of the BBC coverage I've been watching for the last few hours. I wonder if it was exempt due to age or some such. Evidently it was built in 1974.

It's been burning for about 8 hours as I write this. There's still quite a lot of fire above where the water from the hoses is able to reach.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Yeah its too old for that to have been mandated, and its not the kind of thing you can retrofit to a tower that high even if you wanted too typically. The total dead weight of the pipes and water is significant, providing space for the pumps and emergency generators to make the pumps valid in an emergency can also be a major problem in retrofits. Probably nowhere in the world, let alone London which has shit for water pressure strategically, can power sprinklers that high off the mains pressure.
Alkaloid wrote:Nothing wrong with rebuilding with wood, necessarily. Depending on how the fire behaves and the type of building it can actually be better than steel structurally because it will hold it's strength longer at high temperatures. I wouldn't think the structural beams in a building this size would be wood though, more likely cladding.
Yeah was the cladding, and you can see in many videos and pictures large columns of flame burning up the entire exterior, which probably explains why the entire building was engulfed in under 20 minutes.

Like this one

Image

Sorry but their are a lot of preexisting complaints about this building on the web, I am not inclined to think the best practices or even reasonable ones were followed. Reasons exist why fires like this are uncommon in the west. Even in Iran that recent fire disaster similar to this one where the building collapsed was only so bad because the building had literally been packed with flammable material and exits physically blocked with such. Apparently this building only had one fire stairs, I have no idea if that is typical for a 1970s apartment block home to 600 people, but it seems pretty insane once a building is taller then any fire department ladder.

The whole subject is a bit touchy to me personally, while I know no one at risk I finally had to quit a job I had ten years recently in no small part because the new morons in charge were refusing to take certain fire code violations seriously, even after being notified by the insurance company that this was a major problem required to be fixed by a firm date that came and went. Its people like me around the world who are the only reason shit like this isn't every single day, as frankly, fires used to be. The transformation of fire safety in the past 50 years is pretty amazing, so much so that at least in the US fire departments have seriously had to branch out into providing more medical services to stay relevant, but people always try to backslide to save a buck.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by Sea Skimmer »

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This is claimed to be a real fire 'safety' sign from this tower. STAY PUT! Yeah, just like they told all the kids on that South Korean ferry to stay put and die too. The fact that something like this could be put up in a recently remodeled and inspected building in London should concern every citizen and visitor of that city.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by AMX »

In a building that's up to code, "stay put and wait for the fire brigade" would be correct - trying to make your way down a smoke-filled stairway is more dangerous, and if you have to open fire doors on the way you help the fire spread.
Better to wait until either the fire's put out, or you're evacuated through the window.

In a building like this one, on the other hand... :cry:
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by Broomstick »

Back when I worked in the Chicago skyscrapers the policy was to evacuate the floor with a fire and the floors above and below, everyone else stay put. But those were buildings up to code, fully equipped with sprinklers, with fire doors and other fire barriers incorporated into the structure, and with multiple emergency stairwells. It was also for initial action, you needed to be ready to move and evacuate further - a lot of it concerned how to empty a building with 20, 40, 60, even 100 levels in an orderly manner (The Sears/Willis Tower is 110 stories tall and the base occupies and entire city block. Fire drills, never mind actual evacuation, can involve more than 20,000 people)

A lot depends on the materials and even construction techniques used, the number of emergency stairs, whether or not there are sprinklers, whether or not fire drills are conducted, and so forth.

But yeah, if you have a building with a history of problems/violations you have to be suspicious. It also looks like the cladding burned which is odd to my Chicago-trained mind - our exteriors on buildings that tall are metal, concrete, glass... stuff that doesn't burn easily. Wood is a fine building material but not good for all applications. Residents report that the fire extinguishers were past due on safety inspections.

It's tragic, it's horrifying, and I hope those injured can recover.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

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Sea Skimmer wrote:Yeah its too old for that to have been mandated, and its not the kind of thing you can retrofit to a tower that high even if you wanted too typically. The total dead weight of the pipes and water is significant, providing space for the pumps and emergency generators to make the pumps valid in an emergency can also be a major problem in retrofits. Probably nowhere in the world, let alone London which has shit for water pressure strategically, can power sprinklers that high off the mains pressure.
One alternative is to have water tanks either on the roof or located throughout the building that rely on gravity to deliver water in the event of a power failure. There are limitations to that approach, of course, and tanks large enough to be useful take up a LOT of space and represent a LOT of weight. Grenfell tower may be too large for that approach.

There are companies in Chicago, and presumably other large cities with lots of tall buildings, that make their living trying to come up with and install fire suppression systems in large/old buildings.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by Zaune »

Broomstick wrote:But yeah, if you have a building with a history of problems/violations you have to be suspicious. It also looks like the cladding burned which is odd to my Chicago-trained mind - our exteriors on buildings that tall are metal, concrete, glass... stuff that doesn't burn easily. Wood is a fine building material but not good for all applications. Residents report that the fire extinguishers were past due on safety inspections.

It's tragic, it's horrifying, and I hope those injured can recover.
The cladding appears to have been an outer layer of aluminium over some sort of insulation material, installed as a retrofit. Whether the work was up to code is a question I have no doubt the Fire Investigation Team are already looking into.

And extinguishers being past their due-date for an inspection were among the least of this building's issues. A group of concerned residents set up a blog about it, and have helpfully created an index post listing all their previous complaints here. Pay special attention to the fact that not only has the property management company been extremely lax about fire code compliance, but the building has a history of serious electrical problems that resulted in appliances getting fried by over-voltage, and while it was apparently rectified the company was rather vague about what actually happened and what they did to fix it.

The public inquiry into this mess is going to be ugly.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

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Zaune wrote: The cladding appears to have been an outer layer of aluminium over some sort of insulation material, installed as a retrofit. Whether the work was up to code is a question I have no doubt the Fire Investigation Team are already looking into.
The fire safety regulations were reccommended to be updated since the last time this happened (to Lakanal House), but the government haven't bothered doing it.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

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I'd almost guarantee the cladding wasn't up to code. There have been a few buildings clad with the same stuff go up in Melbourne recently, it's effectively aluminium and plastic. In every case they found the contractor cheaped out on the cladding and installed stuff known not to meet the fire safety standards.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

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Vendetta wrote:The fire safety regulations were reccommended to be updated since the last time this happened (to Lakanal House), but the government haven't bothered doing it.
Hah. This is my surprised face: :banghead:
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

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The chap in charge of updating the regs lost his seat last week. His redundancy award? Being made Mays new chief of staff.

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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

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Broomstick wrote: One alternative is to have water tanks either on the roof or located throughout the building that rely on gravity to deliver water in the event of a power failure. There are limitations to that approach, of course, and tanks large enough to be useful take up a LOT of space and represent a LOT of weight. Grenfell tower may be too large for that approach.
Yeah that's usually not realistic as a retrofit, because of how much the weight that high affects the sway of the building. It could make it uncomfortable to live in the building even if its structurally sound. IIRC a few modern buildings actually use these water tanks, or drinking water tanks, as part of their counter mass systems to dampen out said sways. But no way that's getting a retrofit! Nor do you need that in a 24 story building.

You can use some real ligthweight pipes, our beloved US navy was top weight crazy enough to use titanium sprinkler mains on LPD-17 and DDG-1000 for example, and rely on low volume water mists, but that ups the cost over traditional cast pipe segments, and IIRC the water mists only work well with very high pressures so you gotta have pumps in a high rise. Either way costs rise to the point its really not a wonder that the UK would not mandate retrofits to thousands of apartment blocks. \

There are companies in Chicago, and presumably other large cities with lots of tall buildings, that make their living trying to come up with and install fire suppression systems in large/old buildings.
Yeah, with enough time and money and disruption to the tenants you can usually find a way do to it, but its way easier in a commercial property which typically has higher margins, and more ability to clear people out before doing work. Older buildings are sometimes weak and shabby, sometimes they are seriously overbuilt and you can do anything you want. But you're generally not going to get away with the bulky cheap big pipes and high flow water jets people usually think of as sprinklers. Water mist systems are actually more effective in many situations, for one thing they suppress smoke besides fire, but you gotta have high pressure to use them.

But the reality is without basic passive fire safety, plugging gaps, firestops ect..., which may have been seriously lacking here, even sprinklers will have limited effectiveness because the fire will spread inside all the walls and floors all over with a chimney effect. People usually die of smoke long before they die of fire in a fire, so that's a really big problem even if you've got sprinklers.

As far as the reported electrical problems go, I saw one person claiming to have been a subcontractor on the building said many water boxes were installed over the fuse boxes in utility rooms. Which would mean any leak of water would mean the electrical equipment malfunctions, which of course could cause a fire as well as power surges.

12 people confirmed dead, honestly that's way better then it looked like early this morning. No doubt it will rise, but it looks like it was not say, 200.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by Zaune »

One of the many things that advocacy group has been complaining about is substandard wiring that caused power surges and damage to electrical appliances.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

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Christ.

Shit like this shouldn't happen in the modern world.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

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Broomstick wrote:
Sea Skimmer wrote:Yeah its too old for that to have been mandated, and its not the kind of thing you can retrofit to a tower that high even if you wanted too typically. The total dead weight of the pipes and water is significant, providing space for the pumps and emergency generators to make the pumps valid in an emergency can also be a major problem in retrofits. Probably nowhere in the world, let alone London which has shit for water pressure strategically, can power sprinklers that high off the mains pressure.
One alternative is to have water tanks either on the roof or located throughout the building that rely on gravity to deliver water in the event of a power failure. There are limitations to that approach, of course, and tanks large enough to be useful take up a LOT of space and represent a LOT of weight. Grenfell tower may be too large for that approach.
You mean like in Towering Inferno, only without needing explosives to get the job done?
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by LadyTevar »

I read the Concerned Citizens blog. The building owners are claiming each flat was remodeled to be a 'self-contained fire-proof box', surrounded by fire-proofing materials and safety walls that would not burn. Thus, 'staying put' would have left them safe from the fire.
:wtf:
Excuse me, there's no fuckin' way a building built in 1970s is gonna have the ventilation to keep them from dying from smoke inhalation, even if you COULD manually separate each and every flat and make it fire-proof. Besides the smoke, there's also the heat of a fire, which is gonna get up around 1000F, if not higher.

I also read that one woman on the 10th floor dropped her baby out the window, and probably never saw the man catch safely catch it. Witnesses are saying other children were being throw out windows... I fear for that death toll, but at least those that didn't make it died quicker than their parents.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Apparently the UK building codes are very focused on the fire isolation approach, but give no guidance to preventing fires from spreading via the exterior. And the codes its being said are rather clear that isolation is to buy time to escape, not to allow shelter in place, and thus are not themselves psycotic. Maybe if the fire was burning nerve gas in the basement that plan would make sense, I can't see another scenario where you would not at least want all floors above the fire to evacuate.

Some of the reports of people jumping and throwing children appear less then credible though, and considering the amount of debris falling off the building from the get go in darkness a lot might be imagined. And say, one person jumping, reported by three witnesses, is the kind of thing that turns into '3 people jumped' in the media. The baby catch appears to be real and is if nothing else very plausible. Happened before in the US on video.

British tabloids are claiming nobody is known to have escaped the top three floors. As is, it's still burning.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by His Divine Shadow »

They've been complaining about this for years:
https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/

Also the company that did the renovating was caught deleting references to the project from their website, they didn't count on fast twitter activists with screenshots, and web.archive.org.
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Other bits and pieces:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho ... 89951.html

"Tory minister warned against beefing up fire safety rules to include sprinklers because it could discourage house building"
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/t ... p-10622601

"Jeremy Corbyn: Grenfell Tower Fire A Consequence Of Local Funding Cuts"
http://www.lbc.co.uk/news/london/west/k ... l-funding/

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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by Lord Revan »

While I'm not gonna go for the general "kill the rich" approach here, I'd love to see the people in charge of the refurbish and maintenance be charged and convicted for at the very least criminal neglect or what ever is the equilevant UK term.

building fires like this belong to 19th century not the 21st.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by Zaune »

Lord Revan wrote:While I'm not gonna go for the general "kill the rich" approach here, I'd love to see the people in charge of the refurbish and maintenance be charged and convicted for at the very least criminal neglect or what ever is the equilevant UK term.

building fires like this belong to 19th century not the 21st.
Manslaughter by Gross Negligence, probably. And likely the "tenant management organisation" or whatever you call the company the council outsourced to will likely be up on charges under the Corporate Manslaughter Act.
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by Vendetta »

LadyTevar wrote:I read the Concerned Citizens blog. The building owners are claiming each flat was remodeled to be a 'self-contained fire-proof box', surrounded by fire-proofing materials and safety walls that would not burn. Thus, 'staying put' would have left them safe from the fire.
:wtf:
The idea behind this is that a fire in one flat stays in that flat. It doesn't spread outside a relatively contained area and so the only people that would actually be at risk from smoke and heat are people closely adjacent.

I've seen the result of a flat fire in a block without flammable exterior cladding, and only the flat the fire was actually in was seriously affected.
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Broomstick
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by Broomstick »

Question:

My impression is that this is a UK form of what in the US we call public housing - is that correct? Owned by local government, housing not-so-wealthy people, possibly subsidized rent?
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Re: Grenfell Tower Block Fire in London

Post by Minischoles »

Broomstick wrote:Question:

My impression is that this is a UK form of what in the US we call public housing - is that correct? Owned by local government, housing not-so-wealthy people, possibly subsidized rent?
It is, the term here is council housing - it's provided by the local council, at vastly lower rates than private rentals. And by vastly I mean in London the difference between a council house and private rent can quite literally be thousands of pounds per month less.

Unfortunately owned by the council, doesn't mean cared for by the council, as social housing is usually farmed out to private companies to take care of - more often than not for a tidy sum of money, staffed entirely by friends and family of local councillors.

As such it's not that uncommon for council housing to be judged as very much on the lower end and much of it (especially tower blocks) have remained largely the same since the 70s and 80s with only essential or minor cosmetic work done.
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