[HN Gopher] The Grenfell Tower inquiry is uncovering a major cor...
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The Grenfell Tower inquiry is uncovering a major corporate scandal
Author : VieEnCode
Score : 356 points
Date : 2020-12-06 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spectator.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spectator.co.uk)
| rienbdj wrote:
| RBKC are a really nasty bunch. Just recently they removed a cycle
| lane from their high street (only one in their borough) after
| complaints for a few right wing celebrities.
| chiph wrote:
| The American Society of Civil Engineers had a presentation from
| Dr. Angus Law, a UK lecturer in fire safety engineering. There
| are lots of engineering details covered about why it spread so
| quickly (approx. 30 minutes from a single room fire on the 3rd
| floor to reaching the top of the building)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N6eeNjbVws
| joefife wrote:
| Private Eye has been talking about this for over a year. The Page
| 94 podcast gives a very good account.
| phronesis wrote:
| Absolutely. Like so many things, Private Eye is ahead of the
| curve in its reporting. Another podcast worth a mention is
| James O'Brien's recent Full Disclosure interview with Grenfell
| survivor Edward Daffern. Horrifying to hear how the residents
| were treated before, during and after the tragedy, and how
| predictable the whole thing was.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Highly recommend checking out "Well There's Your Problem" which
| is a podcast/YouTube series on engineering disasters. They have
| an episode on Grenfell, specifically, and give some engineering
| details on how the fire got so bad so quickly.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epkCrB8aKXA
| robocat wrote:
| Skip forward to 44:00 for the discussion of the design of the
| cladding, then the discussion proper on direct cause & effect
| starts about 52:00.
|
| The first 3/4 hour is mostly history with a political bent,
| which although it is interesting, it is a bit waffling.
|
| At one point they allude to the Estonia Agreement 1995 which
| has nothing to do with the fire but is interesting:
| https://www.newstatesman.com/node/195304
| oasisbob wrote:
| That podcast is fun, but it's only really superficially about
| engineering disasters.
|
| They even admit this in one of the early episodes, something
| like "surprise! This isn't about engineering, we're really
| doing a personality-driven conversational play!"
|
| Most topics are only superficially researched and even more
| thinly presented. Having 5-10 minutes of information in a two
| hour episode is usually too little for my tastes.
| ppod wrote:
| Might be reading too much into this, but I think there are a few
| layers going on here politically. Grenfell has been held up as an
| example of the failure and incompetence of successive
| Conservative governments. The Spectator and The Times are both
| publications that would be seen as centre-right and more Tory-
| friendly than most, and they both have stories today very
| pointedly (and totally correctly) blaming the Irish company
| Kingspan and this French company. Things are especially tense
| between the French, the Irish, and the British (especially the
| Conservatives) because of the Brexit crunch talks.
|
| They are completely right to point at these companies, and the
| Irish media has totally failed on this story:
|
| https://www.irishtimes.com/business/construction/the-irish-t...
|
| But I think there is an underlying reason why the national
| adjectives are sprinkled all through these articles.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _This chiefly means three products: the actual cladding panels
| (thin aluminium sheets bonded to a core of polyethylene, a
| plastic with similar properties to solid petrol) and two forms of
| combustible foam insulation which were fitted behind it._ "
|
| Cough, cough, cough.
|
| Does anyone know the state of liability laws in Britain? Here in
| the states, the companies involved would be going down in a hail
| of lawsuits and the industry would be scrambling to distance
| itself.
|
| I wonder what the software development industry would look like
| under that kind of investigation.
| remus wrote:
| > ...the companies involved would be going down in a hail of
| lawsuits and the industry would be scrambling to distance
| itself.
|
| I think this is essentially what will happen here. One of the
| problems is that the remediation work to correct the dangerous
| cladding runs in to billions of pounds and is a bill none of
| the individual companies involved can afford, so working out
| exactly who to sue (with everyone denying liability, of course)
| is kinda tricky.
| [deleted]
| james1071 wrote:
| Not a lawyer - think the main issue will be whether the
| companies are shown to have manipulated safety testing.
|
| If not, then it will be a case of bad rules allowing a bad
| product to have been used.
| chaz6 wrote:
| The BBC has been reporting on the Grenfell enquiry and has so far
| published 138 episodes of its podcast.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p066rd9t
| edh649 wrote:
| I would highly highly recommend this podcast. I've listened to
| every single episode from phase 2 (from episode 114), and a
| large majority of those from phase 1. I believe listening to
| this podcast should almost be mandatory for any engineer
| involved with any form of safety system.
|
| For those interested in the engineering side of the scandal,
| phase 2 is amazing listening. The amount of detail the enquiry
| goes into is incredible. The number of failings across the
| construction industry with this project from architecture to
| fire consultants to insulation providers is shocking, but
| despite this you can also see why those failings occured at the
| time. The enquirers are knowledgeable and ask extremely probing
| questions, you can almost hear witnesses squirm.
|
| Phase 1 is worth listening to part of, it's all about what
| happened on the night, the fire service response and failings,
| call center communication, broken lifts, inadequate equipment
| and more. However, it is very heavy and depressing listening,
| and quite repetitive (Phase 1 the podcast was done each day of
| the enquiry, phase 2 is done weekly).
| jka wrote:
| Do you remember whether there's much coverage of the vendor
| selection and evaluation process that led to the choice of
| cladding?
|
| One suspicion I have is that these companies may rebrand and
| continue to operate under different names.
|
| What I wonder as a result is: when future evaluation
| processes take place, would decision-makers make the
| connection to formerly-operating-as company names?
|
| I think and hope that the processes are thorough enough to
| uncover simple avoidance techniques like that, but I also
| think it's wise not to assume that the process is foolproof.
|
| (I'd also wonder whether many web search engines currently
| perform this kind of second-order entity name resolution
| automatically)
| akadruid1 wrote:
| There's significant political interest in finding a corporate
| scandal here. This was a building full of poor people in one of
| the richest areas in the world. The local government pushed the
| installation of the cladding for aesthetic reasons and ignored
| serious safety complaints from the residents. The national
| government voted against banning this cladding - and many of the
| MPs who voted against are landlords who had a financial interest.
| easytiger wrote:
| This comment is entirely part of the problem. Insubstantial
| inferences and half truths are not useful
| saos wrote:
| > many of the MPs who voted against are landlords who had a
| financial interest.
|
| Unfortunately the same MPs who were trying to force us back to
| the office even though coronavirus was still spreading
| secondcoming wrote:
| Can you point out any proof that the government was trying to
| 'force' anyone back to the office. It doesn't ring any bells
| with me (someone who has been WFH in the UK since March)?
| cbzbc wrote:
| I assume the poster was referring to this kind of
| messaging:
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53942542
|
| https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/boris-s-back-to-work-
| cam...
|
| Which arguably doesn't constitute being 'forced' but was
| followed up by the usual government outriders in the press.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Yes, back in August where, by my experience of living in
| London at the time, things were actually looking like
| they were going back to normal in terms of being able to
| socialise.
|
| The pubs were back to normal except had to sign in when
| you entered and it was table service only. I have about 5
| pub apps on my phone.
| cbzbc wrote:
| Yes, in August after a long period of lockdown, when
| schools were due to go back and when Whitty had warned
| that the UK was at the limits of lockdown easing:
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2020/jul/31/uk-
| coro...
|
| It was at that point that the government (and the right
| wing press) were trying to get people to start going back
| into the office (and when YouGov were publishing polls
| that showed that the age group most in favour of people
| going back into the office were the retired).
| marcinzm wrote:
| It seems to me, an outsider, that MPs in the UK can get away
| with pretty much anything and they know it. The whole pedophile
| scandal and it's essential disappearance comes to mind.
| walshemj wrote:
| You know that was basically the police jumping on one witness
| who turned out to be a fantasist? this is similar to the
| whole q annon fantasy about piza parlors and child sex rings
| in the US
|
| MP's have gone to prison for 4/5 years for stuff (the cash
| for questions case) that would be considered normal practice
| in the US
| peteretep wrote:
| You are wrong. Several went to prison in recent memory for
| small amounts of fraudulently claimed expenses: https://en.m.
| wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_parliamentary...
| Veen wrote:
| The "pedophile scandal" was the work one fantasist, himself a
| pedophile, making up lies. He is currently in jail serving an
| 18-year prison sentence for those lies. The real scandal is
| the way the police behaved, harassing very elderly people who
| had served their country for decades with no evidence other
| than the ravings of an easily discredited lunatic.
| pmachinery wrote:
| You mean the Establishment allowed its own police to
| investigate crimes by members of the Establishment and it
| turned out that accusers against the Establishment are the
| real bad ones and Establishment figures are all just
| innocent old war heroes?
|
| My word, who could have predicted that twist?
|
| It's the easiest, and most obvious, thing in the world for
| a regime to kill a scandal or exposure of a conspiracy by
| poisoning the well with outrageous and easily exposed
| claims by easily discredited accusers.
| Veen wrote:
| A masterful exhibition of reasoning! Let me see if I
| follow:
|
| Premise 1) If there was a pedophile conspiracy, the
| conspirators would try to poison the well with easily
| discredited witnesses.
|
| Premise 2) The only evidence of a pedophile conspiracy
| comes from a single completely discredited witness.
|
| Conclusion) Therefore, the pedophile conspiracy
| definitely happened.
| secondcoming wrote:
| This pedophile scandal?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit.
| ..
| et2o wrote:
| You seem pretty dismissive of the article, which does present
| significant evidence of corporate malfeasance.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| Indeed this is particularly egregious:
|
| > When retested in 2007 as part of a different system [the
| insulation] failed combustion tests dramatically. Kingspan
| has argued this was not a consequence of its product, but the
| firm's own internal report warned the new insulation had
| performed 'very differently' -- burning on its own and
| continuing after the test fire was put out.
|
| > But the market was not told of these findings, nor that the
| product had changed. In fact, when the country's largest
| private building control firm, the National House Building
| Council (NHBC) threatened to reject the product due to fears
| over its combustibility in the mid 2010s, Kingspan called in
| the lawyers and threatened it with defamation. The NHBC
| backed down.
|
| This doesn't mean that the government gets off scot-free but
| obviously this is a major corporate scandal that deserves to
| be investigated regardless of perceived political
| motivations.
| noja wrote:
| The government decided to let the construction companies self-
| certify (yes, really) the safety of their own work! (To "cut
| red tape").
| sagarm wrote:
| And when the self-certification is fraudulent, presumably
| they will face few or no repercussions.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _The government decided to let the construction companies
| self-certify (yes, really) the safety of their own work! (To
| "cut red tape")._
|
| You'll find this happening everywhere. Such Boeing self-
| certifying the 737 Max.
| sleepydog wrote:
| It also looks like the various government agencies mentioned in
| the article are either compromised or really phoned it in while
| certifying these products.
| csours wrote:
| "Governments are corporations, my friend" - Mitt Romney,
| probably.
|
| More and more it seems like the line between government and
| corporation is blurring; it was probably always thus, and I
| don't have any strong evidence to say it's getting blurrier,
| but that's how it seems.
| Finnucane wrote:
| The key here is that no one in the chain--not the product
| manufacturers, not the sellers, the construction company, the
| regulators who were supposed to be on watch, etc, had any
| interest or incentive to actually ensure that the product was
| safe and being used appropriately. Until it was too late and
| people died.
|
| And yeah, the slow dissolution of the division between the
| corporate and government is a real trend.
| disabled wrote:
| > cladding for aesthetic reasons
|
| Cladding is used primarily for insulation and energy
| conservation. I think the concept of "cladding" is more of a UK
| and European thing though.
|
| > There's significant political interest in finding a corporate
| scandal here.
|
| There are all sorts of unethical scandals with various forms of
| unethical social experimentation. It's everywhere within the
| corporate world, and there are also open source projects with
| unethical experiments going on. You just have to look and pay
| attention. A lot of these groups play it off like they have
| done proper due process, when they have not. Then they have
| their PR flacks take the reigns using distracting and emotive
| language to justify their unethical projects.
|
| Everyone who works on projects should read this article. Pay
| attention to Table 3 in particular. I keep it on my desk as a
| reminder of what is ethical vs unethical.
|
| An Ethical Framework for Evaluating Experimental Technology:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4912576/
| avianlyric wrote:
| > Cladding is used primarily for insulation and energy
| conservation. I think the concept of "cladding" is more of
|
| You're not wrong, but emails from Kensington council made it
| quite clear they considered Grenfell an eyesore, and cladding
| was seen as a method of improving the aesthetic appeal of the
| building.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Ex council resident here.
|
| This block was clad as part of the "warm safe and dry"
| initiative. This was funding provided by central government to
| make sure that council housing was energy efficient, resistant
| to both criminal and antisocial damage.
|
| Also fixing roofs. You'd be surprised how many time roofs fail
| on council houses.
|
| > The national government voted against banning this cladding
|
| This isn't really true. They voted against a specific amendment
| that demanded that rented accommodation be fit for purpose.
| (Local councils have had the power to condemn accommodation,
| but they then have to re-house the tenants. its really
| complex.)
|
| The scandal here is in three parts:
|
| 1) The people that inspect building regulations are paid for by
| the developers, and not by councils. So there is lots of
| "optionality" in an otherwise good set of rules
|
| 2) The fire ratings of materials appears to not be
| independently vetted. I'm not sure how they are vetted, but
| this is a massive failure in the entire system.
|
| 3) The firebrigade having shit kit, also failed to learn from
| larkenhall.
|
| > ignored serious safety complaints from the residents
|
| Local residents _always_ complain about everything. I know
| because I used to be the vice chair of the Tenants and
| residents association. 25% of the time they are correct.
|
| Grenfell has some interesting features:
|
| 1) it wasn't being managed by the local council. It was owned
| and run by a "TMO" this is quite common.
|
| 2) they appear to have added new flats, which subsidised the
| works, again quite common.
|
| 3) leaseholders were not billed for the repairs. This is very
| unusual. Normally they'd be liable for a pro-rated proportion
| of the total bill (ie if the building has 100 flats of the same
| size and 10million pounds spent, they would be liable for 100k)
| I was stung for 50 grand, others in my estate had bills of 70k+
|
| This is not the first time that a block of flats has killed
| people because of shoddy work. What is unusual in this case is
| that according to the paper work, the work was done to the
| correct standard.
|
| I felt this tragedy closely. As a fellow council resident, I
| know how easily it could have happened to me. Fortunately for
| us, we chose our house specifically with fire in mind
| (larkenhall fire having happened months before) I was lucky
| because I had a choice. If I had been a tenant, I'd have little
| choice.
| jessaustin wrote:
| _The people that inspect building regulations are paid for by
| the developers, and not by councils. So there is lots of
| "optionality" in an otherwise good set of rules._
|
| Please let's say this part quietly. Somehow we haven't
| started doing this in USA yet.
| jcynix wrote:
| Maybe not for buildings. But Boing controlling Boing with
| the 737 max does sound similar?
| scoot_718 wrote:
| > Local residents always complain about everything.
|
| Only true because the UK has a horribly regressive stance on
| renters rights.
| qxmat wrote:
| Can you expand on this?
|
| To my knowledge - as a one-time lettings paralegal - we
| have some of the best tenancy rights in the world.
| secondcoming wrote:
| > 3) leaseholders were not billed for the repairs.
|
| I would assume that most, if not all, of the Grenfell
| residents were renting. I don't think they'd be liable for
| repairs?
| avianlyric wrote:
| Right to buy will mean that most of the flats will have
| been bought. The buyers would then become leaseholders, and
| most leasehold agreements make you liable for the cost of
| repairs to common areas. Those buyers may have then sub-let
| their flats (and those renters won't normally be liable for
| repairs), but it's no uncommon for families to buy their
| council homes and continue living in them.
|
| In theory reserve funds etc should prevent surprise bills,
| but that isn't always a guarantee.
|
| For those not familiar with how flat purchases work in the
| U.K. We have a crazy system where people purchase "long-
| leases" for their flats, you don't own the flat, your just
| renting it for a long period of time (normally 99 or 999
| years depending on your landlord). When you sell your flat,
| you're just selling the remaining period on your lease (the
| 99 years doesn't reset). And yes this does mean that once
| the lease expires you no longer own your flat anymore,
| there are ways of purchasing extensions etc but it's a bit
| much to put into a HN comment.
| easytiger wrote:
| This isn't really the whole story. You have a defacto
| ownership of the property and the "landlord" has a legal
| obligation to renew your lease should it come close to
| expiry.
| dstola wrote:
| > We have a crazy system where people purchase "long-
| leases" for their flats, you don't own the flat, your
| just renting it for a long period of time
|
| Who owns the flats then? A lease of 99 years with rent I
| would assume easily covers the outright cost of the flat.
| Seems crazy to me that this system continues to function.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Usually real estate companies or the original developers.
| It creates all sort of opportunities for abuse. Most of
| these long term leaseholds have a symbolic rent
| ("peppercorn rent") though unscrupulous developers
| started setting up contracts with an initially small rent
| but with a steep contractual step up over time (most
| people do not read the small print). The servicing of the
| property is also often a way to squeeze leaseholders. The
| landlord has control over the servicing company and can
| overcharge through the service charge.
|
| There are some projects of laws to remediate this mess,
| but this requires to overwrite private contracts,
| something gvts have been reluctant to do so far.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| It's really cheap. It certainly helps people stay housed.
| Contrast this to the system in the United States where
| renters can be evicted anytime. Most rental contracts are
| only for a year and rents can be increased at will.
|
| In fact, I propose that we incorporate this system at a
| larger scale in the USA.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Generally there's a management company. In some
| situations owning your flat automatically gives you a
| share in the management company. Other times the company
| and the freehold - as it's called - are owned by a third
| party.
|
| You don't pay rent to the freeholder, but you do pay
| "management fees" which are supposed to cover insurance
| and "admin." You may also pay "ground rent" which is a
| small-ish fee to cover use of the land on which the
| building stands.
|
| In reality freeholders often do a deal with insurance
| companies. They get insurance at a reduced rate and don't
| pass on the savings to leaseholders. There are various
| other scams that can make leaseholding a nightmare.
|
| This is all completely unrelated to renting. As a
| leaseholder you're an owner, for varying values of
| "temporarily".
|
| If your flat has a 999 year lease you can easily sell it
| on or if it has a share of the freehold.
|
| If it's <99 years nd there's no share of the freehold it
| gets harder to sell. And by the time you get to <50 years
| you're going to have serious problems selling it, unless
| it has some outstanding features or benefits to
| compensate or you're in a market segment which is happy
| to treat the money as a simple rental (which does happen,
| especially at the high end).
| sjg007 wrote:
| Hawaii real estate has a similar dynamic.
| avianlyric wrote:
| > Who owns the flats then?
|
| The building owner (freeholder), who is normally also the
| superior landlord.
|
| > A lease of 99 years with rent I would assume easily
| covers the outright cost of the flat.
|
| You pay annual ground rent, UK law means that this is
| pretty much capped to PS250 per year outside of London,
| and PS1000 per year in London. Most ground rents are
| below that (PS30-PS100 per year outside London,
| PS200-PS500 inside London).
|
| So for most leases the ground rent over the lease period
| doesn't even come close to the premium (the amount paid
| the purchase the lease, or what most people would call
| the cost of the flat).
|
| If you do a statutory lease extension (which costs
| money), then the lease is extended to 999 years, and the
| ground rent drops to a peppercorn (another bit of crazy
| English law
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(legal) ).
| iso947 wrote:
| Recent scan has been doubling ground rent every 10 years
| - effectively 7% increase a year
| samizdis wrote:
| Leasehold property rights/regulations in the UK:
|
| https://www.gov.uk/leasehold-property
| ardy42 wrote:
| > For those not familiar with how flat purchases work in
| the U.K. We have a crazy system where people purchase
| "long-leases" for their flats, you don't own the flat,
| your just renting it for a long period of time (normally
| 99 or 999 years depending on your landlord). When you
| sell your flat, you're just selling the remaining period
| on your lease (the 99 years doesn't reset). And yes this
| does mean that once the lease expires you no longer own
| your flat anymore, there are ways of purchasing
| extensions etc but it's a bit much to put into a HN
| comment.
|
| That sounds like real estate in China: the government
| owns all the land, but sells "land use rights" that last
| for a maximum of 70 years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_law#Proced
| ure...
| slumdev wrote:
| > We have a crazy system where people purchase "long-
| leases" for their flats
|
| "Purchasing" one of these "long-leases" strikes me as
| doublespeak, a gimmick no different from prepaying 99
| years of rent. Ownership doesn't expire.
|
| Why on earth would one do this?
| avianlyric wrote:
| > Why on earth would one do this?
|
| There's no real alternatives (other than living on the
| street). Why would builders and landlords give up such an
| obvious advantageous arrangement?
|
| People are pushing for change, common holds are slowly
| becoming a thing. But ultimately there's a housing
| shortage in the U.K, and beggars can't be choosers. It
| sucks, but you can't argue with reality.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| One would do this because there is legislation in place
| which can be used to force an extension of the lease, at
| a fair and controlled rate. https://www.lease-
| advice.org/advice-guide/lease-extension-ge...
| academia_hack wrote:
| It's an historical artifact from a time when people lived
| and worked on the nobility's land as literal serfs. The
| UK is just dreadful at progress, especially when it
| doesn't serve the elite. The whole concept of a 99 year
| lease was actually a major victory for commoners /
| compromise with the nobility and landlord class. While
| that compromise is no longer part of living memory
| (1920s) it's certainly still viewed as the furthest
| acceptable limit by many hereditary and institutional
| landlords.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| The thing to point out here is that you must pay three
| things:
|
| 1) a one off fee for the actual lease, for a
| 125(typically but it can be 999 years for private
| leaseholds, and <10 for commerical property) year term.
| This is normally 10-70% of the going rate for a similar
| freehold property.
|
| 2) each year for the "ground rent" ie a "pepper corn" or
| nominal fee to the person who actually owns the building
| (this is nominally fixed at PS1-100, but in some recent
| scams they are exponential)
|
| 3) "reasonable" maintenance. this is normally paid to
| either the council for a ex council house, or a
| management company. They may not be the same entity as
| the freeholder. You cannot be compelled to pay for
| "improvements" only reasonable upkeep.
|
| Once you have a leasehold, it is tradeable like a
| freehold.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| In the UK people have the right to buy their council
| housing, and many do.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/how_many_tenants_at_
| g...
|
| 14 flats were "privately owned" which is code for "right to
| buy" leaseholds (normally 125 years)
|
| You are correct the renters are not liable for the cost of
| repair directly. The council pays on their behalf. Through
| a huge bureaucratic process the council then gets a
| settlement from the government.
|
| Council Tenants rent the flats/houses with basic
| furnishings (ie kitchen with cooker and bathroom) all of
| which can be (but not always) repaired by the council.
|
| Council Residents have a long term leasehold, and only have
| the right to windows, doors and the walls. Everything else
| they have to look after.
| epanchin wrote:
| Right to Buy - many of the council tenants will have bought
| their flats.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > Local residents always complain about everything.
|
| In this case there had been a previous fire that revealed
| that the cladding was dangerous.
|
| The residents were complaining not about the same kind of
| abstract risk that we deal with in IT, like "what if
| Microsoft Azure ceases to exist overnight", but a real risk
| of death with a recurring proximal cause.
|
| The flat members had spent _serious_ time and effort trying
| to bring attention to their plight, and they were ignored.
| pydry wrote:
| This was the worst part for me. You could literally see the
| words online of the resident who said that if nothing was
| done this would end with charred bodies.
|
| It's not such an exaggeration to say that corporate
| manslaughter was legalized here.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > for aesthetic reasons
|
| It doesn't make much material difference, but I think it was
| more to do with insulation and saving energy, rather than
| aesthetics.
| netsharc wrote:
| Wikipedia says all three.. It seems their priorities list
| were:
|
| 1/2/3. Insulation, Energy, Aesthetics
|
| 4. Cost
|
| 5. Material that doesn't burn up and torch people when it
| catches fire...
|
| Since you're just guessing ("I think"), my guess is if the
| tower wasn't in the richest neighborhood of London, the
| council wouldn't give a shit about its insulation and energy
| savings. And my guess is they added these reasons to make
| themselves look benevolent instead of saying "We're adding
| cladding because the tower looks shit otherwise."
| csours wrote:
| > Since you're just guessing ("I think"), my guess is if
| the tower wasn't in the richest neighborhood of London, the
| council wouldn't give a shit about its insulation and
| energy savings. And my guess is they added these reasons to
| make themselves look benevolent instead of saying "We're
| adding cladding because the tower looks shit otherwise."
|
| Actually, one of the reasons for the beautification is that
| it was quite close to some expensive real estate.
|
| Oh, actually we're agreeing. I read your comment wrong.
| hummusman wrote:
| Building regulations in the Uk mandate a minimum standard
| of fabric energy efficiency regardless of location, both
| for renovations and for new builds. The Greater London
| Authority is quite strict on this for new build
| developments and I suspect that carries through to
| renovations. It's more the other way round in that
| developers are required by local authorities to meet
| efficiency targets, but ending up cutting corners to
| achieve it on the cheap
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > my guess is if the tower wasn't in the richest
| neighborhood of London, the council wouldn't give a shit
| about its insulation and energy savings
|
| This seems backward to me - why do you think a council with
| more financial pressure care less about their bottom line,
| and a council with less financial pressure care more?
| nerdponx wrote:
| Maybe pressure from constituents to stop wasting money on
| projects for undesirable folk.
|
| At least, that's what I would expect here in the USA.
| [deleted]
| tarkin2 wrote:
| This is my reading of it too. I think a lot in government - and
| let's no forget Grenfell was government housing - would love
| for the blame to placed elsewhere.
| willyt wrote:
| This is the crux of it really, it wasn't really government
| housing any more. It was owned and operated by a independent
| entity called a tenant management organisation, a nonprofit
| organisation constituted for the purpose of allowing the
| government to offload the responsibility of running social
| housing properly. Likewise the government also privatised the
| building inspection system which is now also much more
| vulnerable to corruption. So it was a government screw up,
| but not in the American sense that 'the government screws up
| everything they run', but in the sense that the government
| set up a flawed semi privatised system which is prone to
| corruption at lots of levels.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Agree. And that makes it worse. The government washed their
| hands of responsibility - in the name of their favourite
| mantra "shrinking the state" - and the results are horrific
| to see. If government, and those who profit from these
| schemes, can shirk responsibility and point their finger
| elsewhere, they'll suffer little electoral repercussions.
| Retric wrote:
| It was owned and run by a "TMO" not the government. It was
| subsided by the government but that no more makes it a
| government building than Amazon is a government organization
| because they get tax breaks.
| Stierlitz wrote:
| > There's significant political interest in finding a corporate
| scandal here ..
|
| The scandal being safety standards being diluted by previous
| governments and the use of inflammable material in the tiles.
| The tiles being installed to beautify the tower. So as the
| tower would not spoil the view of the more expensive nearby
| towers.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I believe the motivation is mostly energy saving (climate
| change), not aesthetics. In france there is also a programme
| to sponsor adding cladding on all houses, with similar abuse
| by small unscrupulous firms which install anything and
| collect the subsidy.
| Stierlitz wrote:
| You just contradicted by main point. It was precisely
| aesthetics that Grenfell Tower was covered in inflammable
| tiles. Inflammable tiles being used instead of the more
| expensive ones, to make more money for the commercial
| companies.
|
| Who previously got the laws diluted to allow the use of
| inflammable tiles on the outsides of high-rise buildings.
| They got round the law, by sandwiching the inflammable
| material between two sheets of aluminum and then getting
| the sandwich certified as fire retardant.
|
| "Grenfell cladding approved by residents was swapped for
| cheaper version"
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/30/grenfell-
| cla...
| teucris wrote:
| I don't see how exposing a corporate scandal helps politicians
| whose job it is to pass laws to keep this kind of thing from
| happening. The article itself says that these companies sold
| their products in the UK because the regulations were lagging
| behind. Can't it be both a government and a corporate scandal?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| The regulation is fine. Its the policing.
|
| Companies were allowed to change fire tests to make their
| products look better. I honestly can't see how on earth this
| is was allowed.
|
| It was always my understanding that you had to submit your
| product to a third party for testing, and that third party
| was vetted.
|
| Then there is the low grade corruption endemic in
| construction in the UK.
|
| The fact that large councils have Quantity surveyors on a
| percentage fee, rather than a fixed fee, is a big problem.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Attention is a limited resource, both on the individual level
| and the aggregate. If your investigation uncovers a corporate
| scandal, it limits the ability of the public to focus on the
| government failings.
| dash2 wrote:
| That seems unlikely. If this blows up in the press, people
| will become more interested in _both_ corporate and
| government failings - which are deeply intertwined in this
| case, anyway.
| coldcode wrote:
| I fail to see how this is any different that Boeing 737 Max
| which killed even more people. Everyone looked the other way
| and ignored real engineering, just to make more bucks (or
| pounds). Sadly I think that even is the company CEOs had
| their heads chopped off (as was common in England centuries
| ago) would change the behavior of cheating to make more
| money.
| justinclift wrote:
| If they can make it so the companies that produced the
| cladding have to pay for refitting the various buildings,
| it's a pretty huge win for government(s).
|
| Those companies have deep pockets too, so the government may
| feel like they're a good target in this instance.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Plus literally zero action has been taken about the same
| cladding on similar buildings in the 2.5 years since this
| happened...
| easytiger wrote:
| This is a complete lie. Almost every relevant building in the
| UK is or has been assessed is undertakening remedial work on
| this and other fire safety matters.
|
| The amount of lies and misinformation in this thread is
| beyond belief
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Last I checked most places were still arguing over who'd
| pay for it. Here's a story from Oct 2020 showing London
| largest housing association haven't started yet:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-51851900
|
| I'd be happy to be corrected. What percentage has been
| fixed?
| easytiger wrote:
| "fixing" is not something that could happen over night.
| It took significant time to define the parameter of risk
| used to apply guidance on the issues and those are
| subject to nuance in every unique situation.
|
| There are finite resources and experts and many works
| take multiple years to implement.
|
| Thousands of buildings are undergoing this process.
|
| Perhaps you'd care to demonstrate your point by providing
| a list of relevant buildings not currently in this
| process?
| jessaustin wrote:
| They had to have some meetings to schedule the meetings
| to finalize the agenda for their upcoming planning
| meetings? Seems legit...
| recursive wrote:
| The time span in question is 2.5 years. "Over night" is
| only mentioned by you.
| ourcat wrote:
| An additional scandal is the extortionate costs for buildings
| over a certain height in obtaining an EWS1 Form to show to
| mortgage lenders. Without which, your appartment is effectively
| valued at zero, since you'll never be able to sell it.
| easytiger wrote:
| Yea. The difficulty related to the fact the companies verifying
| the buildings had understandable difficulty finding insurers to
| underwrite their opinion.
|
| There are plenty of other scandals with which I am familiar
| where buildings have had huge amounts of completely unjustified
| work done under bad advice
| leashless wrote:
| I live in an affected building. AMA.
| bigbubba wrote:
| Does the government still recommend that people in highrises
| shelter in place when there is a fire in another apartment in the
| building? They did before, after this fire I found the cutesy
| animated videos they published explaining how you should shelter
| in place because fire is unlikely to spread in a highrise.
|
| It seems like bullshit to me. At the first hint of fire in a
| building, I'll be flying down the nearest staircase that doesn't
| have smoke coming out of it. I'd not sit around in a burning
| building waiting to see if the fire gets worse, only to find out
| I no longer have any options for escape.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| Not a fire safety expert but yes, I understand it is still
| sound advice. Keep in mind it's not "shelter until the fire is
| out," it's "shelter until a safety authority gives you
| clearance to leave or your life is at risk."
|
| a) the possibility of stampede is real, especially for
| children, the disabled, and the elderly
|
| b) in a high rise, an evacuation stairwell might seem safe at
| the top but could be impassable much lower down. You would have
| no way of knowing ahead of time. So then evacuees have to
| backtrack and try to find a clear stairwell, which could be
| impossible if the stairs are too crowded.
|
| In my experience with fire drills in high rises, "shelter in
| place" is really about staggered evacuation: first evacuate the
| floors surrounding the area where the fire was detected, then
| continue from there.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| It's not clear to me that this is bad advice if safety
| regulations were followed during construction. Like the 737
| MAX, however, rampant unpunished corporate malfeasance has
| negated it.
| bigbubba wrote:
| It seems to me that if the high-rise building truly resists
| the spread of fire, then sheltering in place is probably the
| optimal solution. However I just can't trust my own life to
| that. Furthermore one of the hazards used to justify this
| advice was the possibility that hallways or stairs are
| already filled with smoke. Well if that's the case, doesn't
| that perhaps call into question the premise that fires stay
| contained in these buildings?
|
| I found a local copy of the video, it was from the London
| Fire Brigade and links to the site knowtheplan.co.uk which is
| now defunct. I can't find the video still on the net, but it
| might be out there somewhere. Edit: found it:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Vy4L8B7KI9k
| labawi wrote:
| A contributing hazard may be ubiquitous use of PVC and
| similar materials that produce toxic fumes. You do not want
| to breathe that even if it doesn't suffocate you
| _immediately_.
|
| Smoke from wood and most "natural" materials - you'll
| usually be fine after a few days, if you manage not to
| suffocate.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Only familiar with US building codes but stairway shafts in
| taller buildings are supposed to be built from thicker
| concrete, with fire-rated doors, so theoretically they
| should remain usable for some time (minutes) even if the
| floors they pass are engulfed. For larger buildings there
| must be two or more stairway shafts in case one is
| compromised. All is negated if doors are propped open,
| locks defeated, structure altered, building is wrapped in
| solidified napalm cladding, etc. So I'm with you, I'd also
| GTFO.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Generally speaking, US fire-safety regulations tend to be
| more stringent than in other countries. In particular,
| there is generally a requirement for two independent exit
| routes whereas many European regulations may permit only
| one, and the US tends to require wider fire stairwells.
| Evacuation in US fire-safety stairwells is likely to be
| quicker and less likely to interfere with firemen access
| (who have to move in the opposite direction from
| evacuating residents) to afflicted floors.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Yet, US still allows to build single family houses, and
| even lowrise condos from wood...
| iguy wrote:
| There are new wooden buildings in Europe too. I wonder if
| these are built to stricter codes, I mean to withstand
| fires for longer?
|
| I agree the US focus seems to be on fast exit, multiple
| options (from buildings that seem to be made of
| matchsticks).
| guerby wrote:
| There's many different way to build with wood, some wood
| buildings will likely be safer than steel and concrete
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63HHsbFtDBo
|
| "Fire Safety and Protection: Why Wood Construction Comes
| Out on Top"
| throwaway201103 wrote:
| Much lower potential loss of life, much shorter path to
| exit the building.
| bigbubba wrote:
| Exactly. These buildings are specifically designed to be
| escapable, at least before the fire becomes horrendously
| bad, so I'll choose to take advantage of that as quick as
| I can.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Only familiar with US building codes but stairway
| shafts in taller buildings are supposed to be built from
| thicker concrete, with fire-rated doors, so theoretically
| they should remain usable for some time (minutes) even if
| the floors they pass are engulfed.
|
| It should be more than minutes. I'm not at all familiar
| with residential codes, but have passing awareness of
| office codes in buildings with a few floors, and those
| (generally) require a two-hour rating for the materials
| of a stairwell.
|
| Of course, as you mention, if the doors are propped open,
| locked or blocked shut, or the walls are improperly built
| or modified, or covered in napalm, the rating doesn't
| mean much. If a high rise building collapses, you're
| pretty much SOL too, although a smaller building would
| likely have the stairwells stay up.
|
| Shelter in place makes sense if the unit is properly fire
| resistant for long enough for the fire to be controlled
| or if the exits are unsafe. However, if you're going to
| exit, you probably want to exit sooner than later. It's
| one of those things that you can't know the right answer
| without more information than you probably have.
|
| If people panic on the exits, that's a recipie for
| disaster as well.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Furthermore one of the hazards used to justify this
| advice was the possibility that hallways or stairs are
| already filled with smoke.
|
| A highrise building must have at least 2 stairwells, or
| emergency stairs, all with emergency lighting, and some
| firefighting equipment.
|
| Internal stairwells must have battery backed smoke
| evacuation systems.
|
| Buildings must have an untouchable reserve of water
| connected to its firefighting hoses, and sprinklers.
|
| Regularly tested sprinklers, and CO detectors should be
| mandatory.
|
| The amount of furniture people have in a highrise must be
| regulated.
|
| Natural gas, or PG supply must by either extremely tightly
| regulated, or banned all together.
|
| Residents of highrise building must have annual evacuation
| drills, and fire inspections.
|
| Apartment owners must be mandated to have at least a
| regularly inspected flame extinguisher, and an escape
| hood/respirator/air pack.
| iguy wrote:
| Where are these regulations from? As in, which country?
|
| > must have at least 2 stairwells, or emergency stairs
|
| The tower in question did not:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=grenfell+tower+floor+plan
|
| So it was designed around a stay-where-you-are fire plan,
| not an immediate evacuation. And this may have been
| entirely sensible for the design as built -- concrete
| floors, concrete walls, and I presume serious doors onto
| the stairs. Then a fire would not spread.
|
| But when you alter this design, then it doesn't work
| anymore. You can break any design with sufficient
| modifications; someone has to enforce that you don't.
| baybal2 wrote:
| As as said above, even much better fireproofed buildings
| may collapse quicky if the circumstances are bad enough.
|
| Fireproofing alone is not a solution.
|
| I think I have not seem a single highrise in my life
| without 2 staircases, or emergency staircase anywhere,
| even in very old buildings.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I take it you live in the US, since you're generally
| describing US fire code regulations, which are not the
| same as regulations in other countries, and are generally
| geared far more towards evacuate-first than
| compartmentalization.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Where are these regulations from? As in, which country?
|
| As an adult, I lived in Russia, Singapore, Canada, and
| China.
|
| Russia for sure has at least half of that in the code.
|
| Singapore, and Canada a bit more, but do not mandate fire
| extinguishers in residential buildings on national level.
|
| And China has all of the above... on paper.
| avianlyric wrote:
| Shelter in place advice hasn't changed.
|
| In theory flats in the U.K. are built with fire barriers
| between each Flat, preventing the spread of fire. If you take
| my flat for example, we separated by concrete walls and fire
| doors from our neighbours on all sides.
|
| Part of the reason why shelter in place still exists, is
| because the fire exits aren't designed to handle every flat
| evacuating at the same time. It would result in people getting
| stuck on stairs and getting trampled. Almost certainly
| resulting in greater loss of life, than if everyone stayed put.
|
| Places like Grenfell failed because the central premise of fire
| insulted flats was broken. Not just by flammable cladding, but
| also by faulty fire doors that failed to prevent the spread of
| smoke into common areas and the build up of flammable materials
| in what should have been fire sterile common areas.
|
| Once again this is an engineering disaster caused by multiple
| failing over a long period of time. Rather than the failure of
| a singular policy. Although the cladding ensured that what
| should have been a small fire became and an inferno that
| quickly overwhelmed the other, already compromised, fire safety
| systems.
| bigbubba wrote:
| To be frank, if everybody else is sheltering in place, that
| means the staircases will be clear for me to run down. If
| everybody thinks as I do, maybe there will be problems. But,
| judging by my experience with staircases in America (namely
| them being fairly wide and numerous), I prefer my odds in the
| staircase. Even if I only manage to get a few floors down
| before becoming tangled in other humans, maybe those few
| floors are enough to put me below the fire, or below the
| floors now filled with toxic smoke.
| avianlyric wrote:
| > But, judging by my experience with staircases in America
| (namely them being fairly wide and numerous), I prefer my
| odds in the staircase.
|
| Quite the opposite is true in the U.K.
| [deleted]
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Staircases often become choked with smoke. You have
| minutes, perhaps, before you are are risk for hypoxia and
| smoke inhalation.
|
| Opening fire doors can undermine the safety of others if
| they don't get closed properly (or if you allow smoke or
| fire to start pouring into a floor.)
|
| That said, it's been clearly demonstrated that developers
| are unwilling (or unable) to pay for proper fire safety, so
| all bets may be off.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > It would result in people getting stuck on stairs and
| getting trampled
|
| This logic is absurd. Who came up with this "advice" is a
| complete idiot, second after a person approving a highrise
| with a single staircase, and even no external escape stairs.
|
| Even without a flammable cladding, you can get as short as
| minutes for how quick a fire can structurally compromise a
| even a very well fire proofed, and and better engineered
| highrise building.
|
| I believe, immediate evacuation was a norm in pretty much
| every country I lived in.
| bigbubba wrote:
| The Station nightclub fire had people get trapped at the
| entrance by a stampede, so it can happen. Ideally buildings
| are now designed to mitigate that, and should have
| occupancy limits set low enough by the fire marshal to
| facilitate immediate evacuations. But if any of that isn't
| true, I think my best bet is making the decision to
| evacuate as early as possible, in hopes of beating the
| rush.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Panic is completely not a reason to not evacuate:
|
| 1. you do not panic in fire unless you want to die.
|
| 2. building may have less than an hour, or even minutes
| of structural integrity left after first alarm is heard.
|
| 3. you may have single minutes until people are
| incapacitated, and cannot leave on their own, or already
| dead from poisoning.
|
| 4. you may have minutes until smoke penetrates
| stairwells, or fire gets the emergency ventilation, or
| smoke gets thick enough to block emergency lighting, and
| people are trapped, even if they have smoke hoods.
| bigbubba wrote:
| I agree. Trampling is a real concern, but one that would
| have me running for the exits sooner, not waiting longer.
| avianlyric wrote:
| > you do not panic in fire unless you want to die.
|
| This is not how panic works. Almost by definition no one
| chooses to panic, that's why it's so dangerous.
|
| As for the rest of your comment. It's also crap written
| by someone who clearly has never studied fire safety and
| has assumed that all fire safety experts are fools.
| Rather than experts who have studied and modelled plenty
| of different scenarios, resulting in modern fire
| standards that rarely fail.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Not sure how you rectify
|
| > _all fire safety experts are fools. Rather than experts
| who have studied and modelled plenty of different
| scenarios, resulting in modern fire standards that rarely
| fail._
|
| With the state of play in the UK, where something like 5%
| of homes need emergency remediation to make them actually
| firesafe. Or 2m people can't get a mortgage [1]. And
| that's with a cutoff of 54 feet of height! When all the
| insulation is retested, but for real, who knows how much
| will need remediation.
|
| [1] https://www.ft.com/content/913cc2ab-7fd5-4d41-a097-df
| 408b4fa...
| avianlyric wrote:
| At a certain point even experts need to assume that
| everyone else in their area is being above board, and not
| actively pushing for unsafe outcomes.
|
| In this case there were a number of companies who
| actively obfuscated critical safety information. That
| doesn't make the designs and safely precautions of others
| invalid, they ultimately have to trust someone.
|
| You wouldn't condemn the entire medical profession
| because one pharma company produce and sold a dangerous
| drug, obfuscating it's risk and only highlighting its
| benefits. Doctors have to assume that manufactures are
| outright lying to them and regulators. The same applies
| to fire safety.
|
| Grenfell happened in large part because cladding
| manufactures obfuscated the failings of their products,
| and government ignored the advice given by experts. Fire
| safety experts had issues numerous warnings about
| Grenfell specifically, before it caught fire.
|
| So I reconcile to two points you bring up quite simply.
| Fire experts didn't err, they highlighted the problems.
| Everyone else just ignored them, we're the fools, not
| them.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > It's also crap written by someone who clearly has never
| studied fire safety and has assumed that all fire safety
| experts are fools.
|
| If those were "experts" who came with this advise, then
| they are indeed round morons who should be fired
| immediately, and people who appointed, and supervised
| them fired too.
|
| People have a head on their shoulders to at least think
| about obvious life, or death decisions.
|
| You do not jump in front of a truck, you do not eat
| rotten potatoes, and you do not stay in a burning house
| no matter what "genius" comes with an alternative opinion
| on that.
|
| That is just mind boggling.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I'm not a civil engineer but from what I understand each
| apartment in a high rise is basically it's own fire resistant
| unit. This theory has been tested many times before.
|
| The problem comes when 1% decided that these ugly old high-
| rises were ruining the view from their million pound townhouse.
|
| The council respond to these perfectly reasonable complaints by
| cladding the ugly building in some nice cladding, sourced from
| the lowest bidder, with little consideration for how it would
| affect the safety of these properties.
|
| The council gets to feel good about spending money improving
| low cost housing; the companies producing and fitting the
| cladding are happy to take the money; and the only people who
| suffer are mostly poor immigrants. Basically a win all around.
| leashless wrote:
| I live in an affected building in London. AMA.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| Greed and hubris is good. This story reminds me a lot of the
| recent documentary, Challenger: Final Flight produced by JJ
| Abrams on Netflix.
|
| "There's pressures of budget, there's pressures of schedule," he
| said. "And then there's all these people, these men and women
| down the chain, who get stuck and saddled with the results of
| those decisions."
|
| I can't help but see a pattern here.
|
| - Big Tobacco
|
| - US opioid crisis
|
| - Challenger disaster
|
| - Grenfell
|
| - Nazi Germany
|
| To paraphrase Baldwin:
|
| "Tragedy is not caused by wicked people; it is not necessary that
| people be wicked but only that they be spineless."
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I'll point out the space shuttle disasters as being
| particularly misunderstood.
|
| The real mistake happened around 1976 when they settled on the
| basic design which they estimated had a 2-3% chance of blowing
| up on any launch.
|
| Every other manned space vehicle has had an emergency escape
| for the crew. An emergency escape system could have saved the
| lives of the Challenger crew because they survived the external
| tank explosion (were killed when the crew compartment hit the
| ocean) -- they thought about putting one in, but then they
| wouldn't have had space in the hatchback for a satellite.
|
| The thermal tiles were also "unsafe at any speed", it was known
| at the beginning that the tiles would get broken or fall off
| sometime and there was a lot of nail-biting around the first
| flights, but after "it" didn't happen a few times people
| started to relax.
|
| Sociologist Dianne Vaughn popularized the term "Normalization
| of Deviance" in connection with the Challenger Disaster but it
| has been greatly misunderstood with the public.
|
| Today people think it is the doctor not washing his hands and
| not being confronted by the nurse about it, but in the case of
| NASA it is a formal process where they make a list of 200
| unacceptable situations about the space shuttle that they make
| the case they can squeak by one by one and each speaker has a
| few minutes to make a case and if they had bad slides and
| didn't make a good point they would clear the floor for the
| next "catastrophe".
|
| "Normalization of Deviance" is a regular procedure with
| dangerous technology -- it's the paperwork that they fill out
| because they put the door frame in the wrong way in the break
| room at the nuclear powerplant or when they fly a regional jet
| back from a regional airport with one angle-of-attack sensor
| down because it can be fixed much more easily at the big
| airport.
| tialaramex wrote:
| > Socialist Dianne Vaughn
|
| Sociologist is probably the word you wanted here, sociology
| is a science about how societies work, how people work
| together, stuff like that.
|
| It's certainly possible Dianne is also a socialist although
| because she's an American it's also likely she does not like
| that word even if it would be an appropriate label, as
| Dianne's sociology and educational background might give her
| good reason to believe that socialist policies are a good
| idea. But even if so it's not why she's important in this
| context.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Nice catch -- i fixed it.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I agree. The Challenger Disaster was bad, but the Columbia
| Disaster was worse. They already know before flying that the
| designs has many problems, they know before reentry that the
| thermal protection was potentially broken.
|
| This is most relevant sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...
|
| > _NASA management referred to this phenomenon as "foam
| shedding". As with the O-ring erosion problems that
| ultimately doomed the Space Shuttle Challenger, NASA
| management became accustomed to these phenomena when no
| serious consequences resulted from these earlier episodes._
| tremon wrote:
| _The real mistake happened around 1976 when they settled on
| the basic design which they estimated had a 2-3% chance of
| blowing up on any launch._
|
| From what I remember from this case study in university
| wasn't that the launch risks weren't ignored, they were
| evaluated and deemed acceptable. The problem was that the
| effect of outside (weather) temperature on the efficacy of
| the rubber seals in the fuel conduits wasn't factored into
| the risk assessments.
|
| After-the-fact analysis of the data from previous launches
| showed a clear relationship between the outside temperature
| during launch and the amount of fuel (or oxygen, don't
| remember) leaked from the joints. But this relationship
| wasn't known before launch, because (IIRC) nobody had done
| such a temperature-gradient analysis on the launch data
| before.
| Pick-A-Hill2019 wrote:
| Normalization of Deviance is a fascinating topic. For those
| interested in reading a bit more about it there is a good
| article entitled
|
| "How I Almost Destroyed a PS50 million War Plane and The
| Normalisation of Deviance."
| https://fastjetperformance.com/blog/how-i-almost-
| destroyed-a...
| [deleted]
| dopylitty wrote:
| It's important to realize even if there was specific malfeasance
| in the companies involved in this particular event the problems
| are systemic.
|
| We are part of an economic system that values profits for a small
| number of people above safety or quality.
|
| While it's important to punish those who behave unethically a
| better response would be to change the system so that ethical
| behavior and the pursuits of safety and quality are valued above
| the pursuit of wealth.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| I'll take the bait:
|
| How do you propose we do that, if all currently known systems
| of government are insufficient?
| dash2 wrote:
| Perhaps rather than focusing on very broad systems of
| government, we could look at changing the system of fire
| regulation and inspection. There's ground in between "blame
| individuals" and "blame capitalism".
| acdha wrote:
| You're just repeating Tyler Cowen's libertarian fallacy of
| assuming the quality of government is constant. A far more
| interesting question would be testing that belief, which
| could then lead to you learning which countries do better and
| why.
| shmageggy wrote:
| Not OP, but I don't read it as bait, and I don't think having
| a solution in mind is a prerequisite for noting a problem.
|
| As for your question, ideas like UBI, post-growth capitalism,
| etc seem to move towards relaxing the ethics vs profit
| dilemmas that systematically drive these disasters (as well
| as most of the other slow-motion disasters like climate
| change, biodiversity loss, etc).
| Camas wrote:
| Fire related deaths have been falling for decades in the UK so
| that system must be working.
| dm319 wrote:
| Nicely phrased, agree. Ethics is key.
| [deleted]
| maxehmookau wrote:
| I'm not sure any of this is a surprise. It is surprising to see
| The Spectator call it out though!
| lopmotr wrote:
| It's funny to think "obviously polyethylene is flammable, how did
| nobody notice" then realize my own house has expanded polystyrene
| and polyester fiber batts insulation under the floor. I wondered
| about fire risk but saw some vague claims by the manufacturers
| and that the local authority approved them, and just trusted
| that, despite these local authorities having a history of
| approving bad products. Decades ago, my dad was very critical of
| all polymer building insulation because of the fire danger. I
| thought he was just out of touch and obviously it wouldn't be
| allowed if it wasn't safe. This isn't the olden days! We're more
| strictly regulated now!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| According to Civil Defense documents, construction post-1945
| was considered to be more vulnerable to the thermal and shock
| effects of nuclear weapons than pre-1945 construction.
|
| Plastic materials were a villain. A black polyurethane couch
| could catch the rays of a H-Bomb fireball 100 kilometers array
| and within 15 seconds create a fireball in the room. Details
| like that create a lot of uncertainty about causalities.
|
| Closer to home your Fire Marshall could demonstrate for you why
| you should not smoke in bed or what happens to a car when you
| light the passenger seat with a Zippo.
|
| Common natural materials have safety properties against fire.
| For instance, if I got too close to a fire, a wool sweater
| would form a char, "ablating" like the Apollo spacecraft heat
| shield. An acrylic sweater would melt and probably transfer
| more heat to my skin and make it more likely that I get burned,
| if it doesn't ignite itself.
| xxpor wrote:
| There's a reason polystyrene is used as the waveguide between
| the two stages in a thermonuclear bomb :\
| twic wrote:
| I got my place insulated when i moved in, so every room is now
| a Celotex box. I remember wondering how they made it fireproof,
| but never looking into it.
|
| Mind you, it's a garret in a mansard roof, so before the
| Celotex it was just wood and bitumen, not exactly fireproof
| either.
| coryrc wrote:
| I don't know of anywhere that allows "polyester fiber batts" as
| a component of insulation. You probably have fiberglass batts,
| which melt eventually but don't burn.
|
| If the EPS (expanded polystyrene) is covered by fiberglass
| insulation and/or drywall, it will last sufficiently long for
| you to escape from a fire.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > If the EPS (expanded polystyrene) is covered by fiberglass
| insulation and/or drywall, it will last sufficiently long for
| you to escape from a fire.
|
| No. EPS offgasses badly when heated. It also assumes that
| your coverage is 100% in drywall.
|
| If you have fibreglass, then you are sunk.
| Rockwool/mineralwool then you are much better.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In the case of skyscrapers it breaks the basic safety concept.
|
| Fires won't propagate up or down a properly built skyscraper
| except by the flames lapping up from floor 14 starting a fire
| on a floor 15.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Your home is presumably only 2-4 stories. So in the event of a
| bad fire you just evacuate. Probably the fire can be
| extinguished, but maybe it can't, either way you aren't inside,
| your insurer is on the hook for any increase in costs from
| products that did not perform. Maybe "the invisible hand" will
| fix that, maybe it won't, but nobody dies.
|
| In a high rise residential building it's a nightmare to
| evacuate, so until that becomes necessary (as it did at
| Grenfell and one of the other phases looked at whether
| emergency services were wrong to delay so long and why that
| happened) the preference is to compartmentalize as you would on
| a ship (can't evacuate those either). As a result of this
| approach to fire fighting it's _critical_ that fire cannot
| spread between compartments. Flat #1 is on fire, a team comes
| out, they fight the fire, maybe Flat #1 is completely ruined,
| but the people in Flat #2 are just annoyed by the smell of
| smoke and the debris, they aren 't actually in danger. At
| Grenfell this cladding meant the fire was able to spread
| outside the building defeating compartmentalization, in
| hindsight once that happened it would be impossible to contain
| it.
|
| So the height of the building isn't just why this is news, it's
| also why it was a problem.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think it's funny that the "Spectator" was a conservative
| newspaper long before we had a Republican party in America... And
| they run articles like this!
| dagw wrote:
| While the Spectator is one of the more Conservative newspapers
| in the UK, in US they would be way to the left of the current
| Republican party. On the whole they're probably even to the
| left of many Conservative politicians in the UK.
| dash2 wrote:
| The Spectator can be crazily right-wing (case in point: Toby
| Young) but it also publishes work that goes against type.
| It's not a monoculture.
| lopmotr wrote:
| Huh? Because conservatives don't like safety? Or they like
| dishonest business practices?
| harimau777 wrote:
| In the US it would be accurate to say that Republicans don't
| value safety or stopping dishonest business practices.
| earhart wrote:
| American conservatives tend to support freedom of contract
| and freedom of speech (including dishonest/incomplete speech)
| - and they consider monetary donations to politicians to be
| speech. They also tend to believe in supply-side economics
| (failures are met with "Well, you didn't cut taxes on the
| rich enough!"), and the myth of the entrepreneur who
| singlehandedly builds a business empire (ignoring the myriad
| ways government supports these activities).
|
| So... yes, American conservatives tend to dislike safety
| (people should be responsible for their own safety,
| regulation will slow down business and make everyone worse
| off), and they tend to support dishonest business practices
| (let the market handle punishment, it's not the government's
| job to decide what truth is and to make sure people are
| honest).
| whatthesmack wrote:
| I get the sense that you're applying your feelings to a
| group you don't like.
|
| As a conservative, I can say that I am interested in safety
| as much as anyone. I certainly don't want to become a
| victim of an avoidable incident, and I don't want anyone
| else to become a victim either.
|
| > American conservatives tend to dislike safety (people
| should be responsible for their own safety, regulation will
| slow down business and make everyone worse off)
|
| People being responsible for their own well-being certainly
| doesn't imply a dislike of safety. It's acknowledging a
| reality that ultimately we are responsible for our own
| fates. And it certainly doesn't rubber-stamp fraud, as is
| the case here where companies literally lied about the
| leveling of their product. In addition, it does not allow
| the government to shirk responsibility for _requiring_ the
| use of the dangerous product in this case.
|
| > it's not the government's job to decide what truth is
|
| Allowing governments free reign to determine truth has
| historically led to immense suffering and hundreds of
| millions of documented deaths.
| Miraste wrote:
| Allowing companies to self-certify their products' safety
| is the same thing as rubber stamping fraud. Issues can
| only be caught after some disaster, as we see with
| Grenfell and the preventable tragedies behind every other
| regulation and certification board. Individual renters
| can't conduct independent fire safety tests on the
| cladding and insulation of their (low income) housing,
| that's absurd. Government regulation and testing for
| product safety is necessary for society to function, and
| there are _many_ examples to this effect.
| EliRivers wrote:
| _It 's acknowledging a reality that ultimately we are
| responsible for our own fates_
|
| Do you really mean "ultimately"? That means "in the end".
| At the last. Ultimately, we all die and there's nothing
| anyone can do about it.
|
| None of us chose when or where to be born. None of chose
| how rich the family we were born into would be (the
| number one indicator of success in life).
|
| People might have chosen to move into Grenfell Tower but
| they didn't know they were choosing to die horribly in a
| fire, and making choices without knowledge carries as
| much responsibility as saying that a lottery winner was
| responsible for their winnings - not untrue but hardly a
| maxim for life.
|
| To say that there is a reality that ultimately we are
| responsible for our own fate just seems to disagree with
| reality.
| camgunz wrote:
| > People being responsible for their own well-being
| certainly doesn't imply a dislike of safety.
|
| Totally agree, and yeah I think "conservatives on the
| street" aren't really advocating for Mad Max levels of
| safety.
|
| But businesses spend billions (trillions?) of dollars
| lobbying against regulations--regulations designed
| explicitly to prevent tragedies like this--and their
| argument largely is "the market will decide". Another way
| to phrase this is "people should be free to choose to
| live in a skyscraper clad in highly flammable material if
| they so choose", which is classic _right to contract_.
| So, I think it 's fair to remind everyone that opposing
| regulations and supporting "market will decide" dynamics
| is core conservatism.
|
| But beyond that, how was anyone living there supposed to
| know this was a problem? I'm a pretty smart software
| engineer and I guess I would... google around for
| building permits? It feels like a tall ask. Like, quick
| show of hands, who here knows what the wires in their
| walls are insulated with? Is that something we think
| people should know? Perfect information is just... a
| mythical creature.
|
| > Allowing governments free reign to determine truth has
| historically led to immense suffering and hundreds of
| millions of documented deaths.
|
| I think there's a middle ground here between "state
| propaganda machine" and "free for all". It's not
| censorship or propaganda to require companies to meet
| building codes, or to punish companies for saying they
| meet building codes by pointing to results of rigged
| tests.
| icedistilled wrote:
| > People being responsible for their own well-being
|
| It's literally impossible for a consumer to evaluate all
| the materials, labor, and external effects involved in
| all the products they encounter or are effected by. Even
| then, if they identify something they find unacceptable,
| how do they avoid it if it's related to a necessity and
| it's an industry standard?
|
| How do you propose the consumer has any realistic chance
| of having a say in these matters other than collectively
| empowering a group of people to look into it and enact
| recommendations and rules?
| kevin_b_er wrote:
| This is the literally fatal flaw in this variety of
| thinking.
| mnd999 wrote:
| In the UK they only care about the safety of people who vote
| for them. And they couldn't care less about dishonest
| business practices of those who donate to them.
| hopw_roewur_ne wrote:
| I didn't know the Spectator was running for office; I guess
| these companies didn't donate to the campaign.
| scraft wrote:
| I and a huge amount of other people are living in a flat which
| currently has a value of PS0 and am currently waiting to find out
| how much remediation works are going to cost to make the building
| I live in safe. As it is deemed unsafe by retrospective
| government fire and safety requirements, it is impossible to get
| a new mortgage for and therefore impossible to sell. The
| remediation costs are likely to be in the 10's of thousands of
| pounds.
|
| The building may have been built to meet the requirements at the
| time (12 years ago) and then again it may not have. The
| guidelines have also obviously changed since Grenfell. But as it
| stands right now, all costs are to be passed onto the leaseholder
| i.e. the person who owns and lives in the flat i.e me. I moved in
| one year ago, had all the survey's done, used a solicitor and
| followed all procedure. Other people are in even worse positions,
| if they can't afford a bill of PS50,000 their only option maybe
| bankruptcy, if they are in various legal professions or an
| accountant this means automatically losing their license to
| practice. Other people who have used the governments partial
| ownership scheme, where you buy 25% of a property and then rent
| (paying 25% less rent per month) are being asked to pay 100% of
| the remediation costs. For a lot of people the costs are more
| than the 25% stake in the property they own.
|
| Some property developers followed the guidelines at the time so
| say it isn't their fault. The government says it followed the
| standards at the time so it isn't their fault. The building
| inspectors which failed to properly inspect properties (when
| there were actual issues outside of what has been changed
| retrospectively) seem to have immunity against legal action. The
| cladding companies who made unsafe cladding are trying to weasel
| their way out of responsibility by saying it is safe in the right
| circumstances. It feels like there are a few slices of blame to
| dish out. But one party who has had NO involvement in any of this
| is the people living in the flats.
|
| The most sensible option I have heard suggested so far is that
| the government pays to clean up this entire scandal, and then
| puts a levy on property developers making flats so they get a
| percentage back on each new development to slowly recoup the
| money. But instead of that, the government is making various
| noises about wanting to protect leaseholders whilst
| simultaneously not doing anything concrete, even though as I
| write this people are already filing bankruptcy, giving up their
| flat which has all the money they have ever saved in, and on top
| of that, the remediation work in subject to VAT so the government
| brings in tax for all work done to fix up this mess. You can
| track huge sums (millions of pounds) being donated/pumped into
| the conservative party by property developers, and of course
| members of the conservative party also have shares or other
| stakes in property development companies.
|
| It is a scandal of the highest order.
| erentz wrote:
| I'm dealing with my own fire safety related conflict at the
| moment. Maybe I am the asshole in the story but my building
| recently announced its annual fire inspection to all residents of
| the ~350 apartments, by email, the day before it was to happen.
| They said there was no choice. They provided no information about
| the pandemic response plan of the contractor or the infection
| control measures they would be taking.
|
| Since both myself and my wife are quite serious immunocompromised
| I objected. I told them I couldn't let them in with all this
| lacking and instead to call me when they reached my apartment and
| we could do it via phone or video call or I could separately take
| videos of what they need. Now I've seen these guys when they do
| this work before (having lived here for a number of years) and
| they just open the door step in and then slam it behind them.
| They don't knock and wait. It's absurd. I stuck a notice on my
| door telling them to call or video call first when arriving. They
| didn't enter but didn't call.
|
| Fast forward a week. They're now giving me notice they'll come in
| against my objection. They won't answer any questions about the
| pandemic response plan or what vetting they did of their
| contractor and it seems the contractor doesn't have one (or it's
| embarrassingly bad). They said for PPE they use cloth masks,
| which are quite inadequate for protecting us. They said they take
| their temperatures but as the UK's Chochrane review showed that
| is next to useless in screening infected people.
|
| I provided thorough videos of me testing every alarm in the
| apartment and showing every sprinkler head in detail. I captured
| a video of the building alarms sounding in every room on the day
| of the inspection. They will not view these and tell me what is
| inadequate about them. They simply say they must do a physical
| inspection but won't tell me who says or what regulation says it
| must be physical.
|
| Now by my very napkin math these inspectors - if they're doing
| inspections like this day in day out - could comfortably enter up
| to a thousand homes in a week. In the middle of the worst peak
| yet in this pandemic. Without proper protection for both
| protecting themselves and if they are infected from protecting
| the occupants. And without any testing regime in place to catch
| them early if they are sick. No plan in place to notify buildings
| or residents they have visited if an employee does get sick. None
| of that. They don't even ask the residents if they have any
| symptoms or are sick before barging in. It seems like a high risk
| job and a poorly controlled vector of transmission. Entirely
| because the corporate landlord is lazy and doesn't care. And the
| fire inspection contractor company is lazy and doesn't care. And
| they can all get away with being lazy and not caring.
| corty wrote:
| since they announced coming in writing, you have the paperwork
| to get an injunction against them. get a lawyer and good luck!
| gpderetta wrote:
| Is this in the uk? Assuming the parent is renting I'm pretty
| sure the parent can just refuse and the landlord will need an
| injunction to get in. Good luck getting one in this period.
|
| The right of quiet enjoyment of your home trumps any
| contractual provision of inspection.
| quattrofan wrote:
| Manslaughter charges for the execs should follow.
| AlexMoffat wrote:
| At least none of the top level comments are claiming the
| invisible hand would solve this if only there were fewer
| regulations. Better enforcement and more regulations seem from
| experience to be the only way.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| I suppose the $64,000 question is this: how many other Grenfell
| Towers are out there, and how can they be identified? The scope
| would probably be pretty clear if it were just a matter of one
| negligent construction company, but it seems like this is a
| problem that spans the whole chain of approving, selecting,
| selling, and installing this product category.
| xxpor wrote:
| Anyone know the status of the legality of similar cladding and
| insulation in the US?
| walshemj wrote:
| Lots in my local town there was a new development where a lot
| of flats and a new hotel have had to have cladding replaced.
| DanBC wrote:
| They are being identified. It's causing problems for some home-
| owners. https://bylinetimes.com/2020/08/28/the-cladding-trap-
| thousan...
| samizdis wrote:
| A news report from June of this year suggests a figure of 2,000
| other UK buildings affected:
|
| https://metro.co.uk/2020/06/12/2000-buildings-still-have-gre...
|
| Edited to add:
|
| The UK government publishes "ACM [aluminium composite material]
| remediation data" every month. This is "being collected to help
| the Building Safety Programme make buildings safe and to make
| people feel safe from the risk of fire, now and in the future".
|
| https://www.gov.uk/guidance/aluminium-composite-material-cla...
| naringas wrote:
| rich wealthy country corruption: the building gets built and
| (if)when disaster strikes, the corruption is revealed by broken
| safety regulations.
|
| 3rd world country corruption: the project gets started, maybe
| they put the first stone in a ceremony. nothing gets built and
| years later there's an empty lot sitting there.
| bjornsing wrote:
| "Celotex even inquired about using the [Grenfell] tower as a case
| study for the suitability of its product for high rises. So it
| has turned out, although not in the way the company hoped." To
| say the least... :(
| ggcdn wrote:
| > An unforgivably naive market of architects and contractors then
| began merrily specifying it for a wide range of uses well beyond
| its original test.
|
| Architects are architects, Contractors are contractors, and
| neither are fire engineers. No one can be an expert on
| everything. This is why we have building codes, product
| certification, and engineering assurance process. The problem
| here appeared to be dishonest players. If certified independent
| labs were required to test products, and licensed engineers were
| required to approve the assembly and submit their letters of
| insurance for the permit, it seems like there would be a net
| benefit to the public (this is how it works in Canada). If there
| was a stronger regulatory system, the investigators would be able
| to look up the letters of assurance for this permit, obtain the
| project documentation from the responsible engineer, investigate
| and possible charge him with negligence if he failed to spec a
| certified fire assembly. It appears that in the UK, there is no
| clear hierarchy of responsibility. When everyone is responsible,
| no one is responsible.
|
| As an aside, Fire rating generally involves more than just a
| single product - it requires an 'assembly'. That assembly must be
| recreated every time the product is used to achieve the fire
| rating. If the testing assembly required 1/2" non-combustible
| cement backing board, the installation also requires it. It
| sounds like the fire rated assemblies were not being followed in
| this case.
| tomp wrote:
| key quotes:
|
| _> Arconic realised its polyethylene-cored cladding had a
| horrendous reaction to fire following French tests in 2005, where
| it burned fiercely and obtained a basement ranking of Class E.
| Despite this, Arconic continued to market it as the much safer
| Class B_
|
| _> The Irish company Kingspan's insulation passed one of these
| tests, which took place on a fake wall made with non-combustible
| cement. This test pass permitted its use on tall buildings, but
| only in an exact replica of the system tested. Despite this, the
| firm marketed its insulation as 'suitable for use on high-rise
| buildings'. [...] After the test was passed in 2005, Kingspan
| altered the chemical composition of the insulation so that it was
| no longer the same product_
|
| _> Celotex, a smaller firm [...] its insulation had also passed
| a test, also using a non-combustible cladding panel, and it too
| began to market its product as safe for use on high rises. But
| the test was not as it seemed: fire resisting boards were used
| around the temperature monitors that record the pass or fail,
| distorting the result._
|
| _> the Local Authority Building Control [...] appears to have
| written its certificate simply by copy and pasting an email
| written by Celotex 's Jon Roper, even including the same typo on
| the certificate._
|
| So, among Arconic, Kingspan, Celotex, LABC (or Spectator, if
| they're pulling a Bloomberg) - I wonder if anyone is going to
| jail...
| mellosouls wrote:
| I can't read the article to see if it's mentioned but a
| reminder that Arconic employees have refused to give evidence:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54792111
| asplake wrote:
| I wonder if in the long run that will make them easier to
| prosecute &/or sue. Certainly hope so
| ashtonkem wrote:
| In the US, refusing to give evidence (taking the fifth) can
| be used against you in a _civil_ suit, but it cannot be
| used against you criminally. If you're facing civil and
| criminal liability at the same time, this puts you in a
| tough situation, since protecting yourself from criminal
| liability might increase your civil exposure.
|
| I believe in the UK refusing to give evidence might be
| worse, both because they have a whole different model of
| courts (inquisitive vs. adversarial), and because the
| underpinnings of US legal rights stem from a perceived
| short coming of the British court system.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Our system of courts is at base very similar to the US,
| and is adversarial. The only significant parts which
| aren't are the coroner's courts which investigate deaths
| using an inquisitorial process.
|
| [Edit: we also sometimes have public enquiries, sometimes
| headed by judges, but these aren't courts as such: there
| are no civil penalties or criminal punishments as a
| direct result of the enquiry]
|
| Our procedural rights are mostly similar too (we have
| corrected most of the abuses since the 18th Century).
| Your right to silence _is_ qualified, though, and has
| been since the 1990s. Basically, you can 't remain silent
| during questioning and then run a 'surprise' defence: so
| if you're going to claim an alibi at trial, you can't
| wait until the trial has started to mention it. If you
| do, the magistrates or jury are allowed to draw adverse
| inferences from your earlier silence.
|
| I don't much like this change. I don't know how much of a
| difference it makes in practice; there aren't ongoing
| campaigns by defence lawyers to have it overturned, for
| example.
| russholmes wrote:
| Yes, the UK police caution is "You do not have to say
| anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not
| mention when questioned something which you later rely on
| in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."
|
| Adverse inferences can be made in court.
| secondcoming wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Three French and one German employee of Arconic say they
| might breach a law in France which prevents evidence being
| given to proceedings abroad.
|
| > The law in question is known informally as the French
| Blocking Statute.
|
| Maybe a French HN member can give us more info on this law.
| guerby wrote:
| French citizens and headquartered corporations cannot
| answer a foreign justice request concerning some things
| (pretty much everything as the wording is vague) without
| refering it first to the french government. Failing to do
| so exposes to fines and possibily jail.
|
| https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/JORFTEXT000000501326
| /...
|
| "Loi ndeg 68-678 du 26 juillet 1968 relative a la
| communication de documents et renseignements d'ordre
| economique, commercial, industriel, financier ou technique
| a des personnes physiques ou morales etrangeres"
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