Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
You don't have to be a fire safety expert to see that the outside of the building was on fire, and ferociously so. There is no way a fire in a fourth floor kitchen should spread to the top of the building under any circumstances whatsoever. There simply shouldn't be enough flammable material in the basic fabric of the building to allow it. Yet someone thought it was a great idea to put flammable material all the way up the outside of the building, pretty much ensuring that any fire serious enough to blow out any one window could then spread right across the whole structure. This is an utter, utter national scandal of the highest order, and would have been so even if nobody had died. But a lot of people did die, and it seems some of them are so badly burned they may never be identified.
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I was listening to an expert on this sort of thing and he was saying how critical a number of other factors are in order to make this cladding system safe - both in terms of other materials used in conjunction with the cladding and the correct installation of measures to prevent the spread of fire via the stack effect for example. It seems to me that any one of them not implemented correctly could have compromised the entire installation. What'll be critical is identifying whether this is a localised issue due to, say, incorrect installation or a fundamental misunderstanding of the fire risks associated with this cladding. We saw with 9/11 that (if you don't happen to believe they were blown up by the CIA or whatever) buildings which were designed to be able to cope with virtually anything collapsed in the extreme conditions resulting from the impact and ignition of aviation fuel from 2 jet liners. IIRC all the design testing done confirmed they shouldn't have collapsed but they did nonetheless and I'm still not sure they've found out what went wrong with 100% certainty and whether anything has been done to prevent the same thing happening again in any of America's other huge buildings.
Another big problem I can see here is the information being given to residents. They were told to stay put and in this case, with hindsight, that may not have been the best option. Had they all decided to evacuate ASAP the death toll may have been reduced but on the other hand in the panic and smoke things could have turned out far worse. Right now anyone living in one of these blocks is going to be wanting clarity on what to do in the event of fire and how likely are they to want to follow the current advice? God forbid we have another entirely preventable tragedy caused as a result of the uncertainties resulting from this one.