Fire at Grenfell Tower in London

Fatalities reported. Utterly scandalous, given that residents have been complaining about the safety of the building for years, as can be seen in this blog post from last November:

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

Just heard a tenant describing a distraught mother with 2 missing kids, it sounds terrible.

also heard someone on the radio suggesting that the cosmetic cladding might have helped the upwards spread of the fire on the outside of the building.

jesus christ.

The standard message in tower block fires is to stay in your flat and let the fire services deal with it - which is apparently good advice if the safety systems work but fatal if they don't.

There's an old Japanese guy stuck at a window for the past five hours apparently, GMB kept showing him..

Terrible terrible reports

Footage is unbelievable. I'm not able to even really look at it too much because being trapped in a night-time fire either alone or with your kids in PJs is just ... literally can't bear to think about it.

Makes me absolutely outraged that a fire this bad can happen when we have decent fire regs and the ability to prevent it. And when residents have been warning about it!

It's a housing crisis and austerity double whammy this: council used refurb as a chance to fit even more homes in there, and sold off the surrounding land so tightly residents were concerned about emergency access. Meanwhile fire service cuts mean fewer safety visits and less effective enforcement. And costs can't have been far from the mind of those postponing the fire regs reviews in the wake of Camberwell. That was on Gavin Barwell's watch, mind.

fire service cuts in london were at boris johnson's behest

Yes, I hope someone buttonholes him about that. Kensington & Chelsea council, figures.

let's not use an entirely preventable tragedy to play politics

Worth following Dawn Foster on Twitter for more on this. It appears the block was remodeled recently to increase the density, leaving one staircase for the entire block. The cladding appears to be flammable and no integrating fire alarm system was put in.

There are reports of people jumping and someone holding a toddler out of a window. What a horrible, grim, preventable disaster.

I'm guessing this is a coincidence of the casual/enraged author, but that blog post reads like a threat, in several places.

baby thrown, and caught, from 9th floor apparently

5-y-o thrown from 6th floor, seems to be okay

i imagine many more did not make it

people need to go to jail over this. this isn't the goddamn 1800s

I'm sure whoever's responsible will be vilified and prosecuted to the same extent as anybody else responsible for multiple deaths

heads will have to roll over this, there has been a fucking criminal level of negligence here. It is like people in social housing are less important than cattle.

I've just driven past it on the way to White City and even though I knew what to expect I still couldn't stop from saying "holy fuck". It's an awful, hideous sight. It's still burning too, flames out of windows about halfway up.

There *must* be arrests here. These people were left to die by fucking Kensington

it's almost as if profit-driven housing policy and years of underinvestment in public services have consequences

i mean, JUST FANCY THAT.

It is like people in social housing are less important than cattle.

More expensive though. I suppose if you can't manage to ship these people as far away from your private tenants as possible, just cram as many as possible into substandard housing as you can get away with.

it doesn't help the situation when you have a Labour mayor who is pro "affordable housing". He doesn't seem to gaf about the state of social housing and aggressive gentrification.

b-but kensington is a bit misleading i think: the people who live in this part of london call it white city, which has very different associations

I keep thinking about Hillsborough and how many parallels there are despite the disasters themselves being completely different.

this is some fucking third-world shit, those responsible need to be punished to the fullest extent of the law

Sorry, I was trying to condemn the council with the fifth-lowest-council-tax and near-wealthiest residents for failing these people more than the area in toto

Council truck at Shepherd's Bush green collecting donations of essentials and clothes

xp Right - both the Big Society and May's half-arsed populism have let them down.

/b-but kensington/ is a bit misleading i think: the people who live in this part of london call it white city, which has very different associations

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JuFvCbwAMOs/WT7IVw7PQOI/AAAAAAAACUM/ZY70LiRCwRQ89ms7AjAWnlgWjYqRbI0OwCLcB/s1600/kensington_map.png

both points reinforced really. this area has significant areas of deprivation while also being v wealthy/Tory. this is utterly horrific.

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JuFvCbwAMOs/WT7IVw7PQOI/AAAAAAAACUM/ZY70LiRCwRQ89ms7AjAWnlgWjYqRbI0OwCLcB/s1600/kensington_map.png

The Standard are running an appeal but replies to George 'Keep Britain Austere' Osborne's tweets right now are fractious to say the least.

yes, sorry stet, i wasn't having a go -- the political point you're making is entirely correct

Government have also been pushing back against installing sprinkler systems in tower blocks and care homes, despite fire service advice.

Landlord spent £10million to put cladding to make building look pretty (for surrounding rich) for 300k they could have sprinkler system.

ffs, i feel sick :(

Where are those figures from?

from a UK rapper on twitter admittedly, but evidence suggests even if the figures are wrong the rest is true.

A sprinkler system is unlikely to have helped

How do you work that one out?

If a sprinkler system only saved one solitary life it would have made a difference ffs!

Inflammable cladding obv. preferable.

Ilx is very lucky to have a fire safety expert on the thread tho.

Sprinklers are designed to contain fires not put them out, and they work better in contained areas. This fire looks to have spread primarily through the outside of the building and would have been too severe to be controlled by sprinklers when it came back into the building. The scandal is the cladding and there are also question marks over the effectiveness of the fire doors.

"This fire looks to have spread primarily through the outside of the building and would have been too severe to be controlled by sprinklers"

Nobody knows this for certain at this point, with all due respect.

Of course.

Oh, you just felt like doing a lawyer routine then.

Son Of Dorke

calz step back a second. Kozelek is just laying out some info it seems to me

sorry, but presenting shit opinions as facts is bs. But I am a bit angry atm and will step back for the good of the thread.

Thank you Tracer. Like calzino says it is impossible to be certain of anything at this stage. I'm not trying to present anything as fact, feel free to take me with a pinch of salt.

I'm not an expert by any means but I did work in this area for a couple of years. This is an extremely unusual fire.

Tell you what might have helped, a fucking fire alarm.

I heard a tenant on the radio this morning say that there was no central alarm, her own smoke alarm only went off when she opened her door to see what was happening

I have worked on shitloads of flat refurbs in the north and have never seen one without a fire alarm before. I think even some of the four storey maisonette ones had fire alarms.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/08/grenfell-tower-more-costly-fire-resistant-cladding-plan-was-dropped?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

But a few months later the council decided Leadbitter wanted to spend too much on the refurbishment and put the contract out to tender to save £1.3m. It selected Rydon, which provided a lower price but fitted the building with combustible cladding which caught fire on 14 June 2017”.

A film shown about the Choucair (family) has caused considerable distress in the inquiry room.

It showed distressing images of people trapped in the building as it burned and around 20 people have got up and left the room, some breaking down in tears and wailing.

Outside in the foyer one person is having what appears to be a panic attack and is being assisted by one of the counsellors and several other people.

The counsel to the inquiry has described is as “a medical emergency”. The counsel to the inquiry has had to stop the film as a result of this. Even as someone not directly affected by the fire the images were shocking, so survivors’ reaction are completely understandable.

The counsel to the inquiry, Bernard Richmond, had said he would warn people if images of fire or the building were about to be shown but has admitted that he forgot.

Paramedics are now here treating the woman who collapsed and she seems to have gathered her composure and is being counselled in an anteroom.

It felt very quickly that the content of the film was too much for some people and there were pockets of commotion around the auditorium as people decided whether to leave or not.

But the film was allowed to run on for a couple of minutes more. This feels like a difficult moment for the inquiry so early on. Emotions are still incredibly raw and there will be more distressing testimony to come in the weeks and months ahead. How that is handled is now sure to be reviewed by the inquiry team.

The counsel to the inquiry, Bernard Richmond, had said he would warn people if images of fire or the building were about to be shown but has admitted that he forgot.

do better you fucking goon

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jun/08/grenfell-inquiry-mayor-calls-for-move-to-venue-nearer-tower

Posted mainly for the picture. I've been watching them slowly put this up, the white covering, and it does a good job of hiding the thing against the sky. But it sort of feels like they are covering it up. And the billboard at the top feels like lip service.

(I think there's a service planned and maybe covering it up like this might allow people to attend who might not if it was still just a charred stump)

Lots of luxury flats going up in the area too (TVC conversion, the huge university tower...) And other building work (Westfield extension...) They must all overlook Grenfell.

Was wondering why it had taken them so long to cover it - feels like something that should've happened well over six months ago.

This is an official response & complaint against Andrew O’Hagan’s article ‘The Tower’. Please read below and share widely. This has been written by Melanie Coles and fully supported by me, a bereaved family member and the #Grenfell community #thetower #article #grenfelltower pic.twitter.com/TeO8nZ6iya

— Noha Maher (@inohauk) June 3, 2018

There's currently a very serious fire going on on a new build estate in Barking. The buildings are clad in wood, which the developer has been telling residents was fire resistant.

jesus, is it a tower block construction?

Looks about six floors high from what I can see.

https://news.sky.com/story/100-firefighters-tackle-six-floor-fire-at-flats-in-barking-east-london-11738455

Wooden balconies by the looks of things.

that balcony material looking extremely flammable from the pic.

just heard a witness on the radio say something about no alarms going off.

the developer has been telling residents was fire resistant

I imagine 'fire resistant' in wood is much like my experience of 'water resistant' in clothing; it may resist a very brief exposure, or else a longer, but minimal exposure, but beyond that it soaks through. iow, it is a worthless marketing term, meant to suggest far more than it says.

I once worked on a new build childrens hospice that was mostly made out of wood, with some steel cladding and breeze. I kept commenting to colleagues that you wouldn't fancy the structures chances in a fire, but it was fire resistant wood blah blah someone said .. Part of it burned to the ground only a few years after it opened. I was mortified when it was reported an electrical fault was the cause.. but then it turned out to be a fault on on the high voltage supply side of the plant room, which we was nothing to do with thankfully.

https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/pms-chief-of-staff-did-not-act-on-multiple-warnings-about-fire-safety-in-months-before-grenfell-new-letters-show-61883

heads will roll ... by about 2040 when most of the criminally negligent bodies are already half dead.

Saw the tweet with that story when I woke up - have other places picked up on this?

Grenfell report to be released..... 30 October.

hollow lol

Lunchtime update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

- Rydon manager gloated about being 'quids in' as he discussed profit boost company would get through switching cladding to deadly ACM pic.twitter.com/qBmuZuamep

— Peter Apps (@PeteApps) September 7, 2020

https://i.imgur.com/78x2Q8b.jpg

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/16/fire-test-for-grenfell-foam-cladding-panels-was-rigged-admits-ex-employee

It's bizarre how little noise the Grenfell enquiry is making when stuff like this is happening.

i would like to understand more about how the intense anger and extensively held sentiment of 'never again' at the time translates over time into something that seems to be treated with indifference.

• what I might call 'benign news churn'; headlines today supplant headlines of yesterday
• specific news displacement (covid, trump, brexit)
• calculated news displacement - it's baked into the ideology of many newspapers/commentators and their surround nexus of politics to not really care, and may be in their interests not to give it salience
• indifference to representing technical process and arguments in the news (probably best summed up by a flagship BBC programme - I think it may even have been Newsnight - saying that they wouldn't go into the technical details of a Brexit argument because it was 'a bit nerdy').
• complete non-existence of sustained campaigning journalism, unless you count the ceaseless campaigning of some papers against Europe or Labour, say. I think those examples are just built into the editorial/business model.
• a psychological condition of fatigue among the public (i'm always wary of this - awareness and interest seems to me to be such a function of media salience (eg Brexit) that I don't see how fatigue can be a function of its *lack* of salience.
• aversion to the horror of it, don't want to think about people dying in a tower block (i felt the overriding emotion at the time was anger)
• 'one of those things that happens' - nothing to be done (perhaps a corollary of the lack of sustained campaigning journalism informing people that it was directly caused by decisions made by nameable people and organisations)

absence of obvious path citizens can take to effect change would be a big part of it, I'd imagine

Like, once concerned people have signed the digital petition and expressed anger on social media, I don't know if it's clear what they can do *next*. Write to their MP? My MP was tweeting the above story at breakfast, he's already engaged. But where to place that anger next? And if it is not put into action, does it dissipate?

calculated news displacement - it's baked into the ideology of many newspapers/commentators and their surround nexus of politics to not really care, and may be in their interests not to give it salience

xpost well this is it. my very broad brushstroke on the social function of the media prior to the upheavals brought about by the internet and 24 hour news is to be the eyes and mouthpiece of their readership. in some respects the fact this ever overlapped with the key business model of 'keeping the ads apart' is a bit of a mystery, unless you assume that people were interested and willing to pay for a newspaper that found out things beyond that which was obvious - muckraking, investigative journalism, newsgathering - and also the professionalisation of that group.

Point about the 'mouthpiece' bit, is that it allowed newspapers to amplify editorially their readership's concerns to push back against public and private institutions. This view has mutated to a degree to the point where rather than 'amplify' we would say they 'create' their readership's concerns to have power over the rule-setting space of government.

I think a lot of the above is also bloody naive - newspaper ownership self-interest, readership and politics have always uneasily co-existed, and the editorial decision about what their readership cares about ≠ some sort of objective social good.

However, to your point stevie, in terms of that mouthpiece role, social media has given a lot more voice, but to a lot less end - it's less focused and amplified, there's more frustration in the process, maybe? It's become axiomatic that awareness - the 'eyes' part of that equation - has become a lot more editorially confused and undifferentiated, for good and bad. An editorial team does not decide what you see in the morning.

Started this post before a meeting, had the meeting, and now feel it's become a bit rambly to no end. so just hit 'post' i guess?

This is giving much too good faith but is probably the closest reason. The lives of those who died at Grenfell fundamentally don’t matter to the country as a whole, they were the wrong kind of people. You see this pattern repeated over the decades and even centuries, if the deaths at Hillsborough mattered to anyone outside Liverpool, then the Sun would have ceased to exist long ago. If Grenfell was to matter, then Amber Rudd wouldn’t have been welcomed back to cabinet six months after having to resign by the press, and there would be more interrogation of the fact that ordinary people were burning replica Grenfell Towers in their bonfires and sharing the videos. It’s all built on structural racism from the ground up but it comes down to the same thing: their lives didn’t matter to the government or to the press, and therefore the public.
― scampus fugit (gyac), Tuesday, 17 November 2020 11:28 bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, Hillsborough is an important comparison isn't it. There did seem to be a lot of widespread anger at Grenfell (and again, through what medium could i possibly know that - that mixture of the people i know, my social media vectors, and the mainstream media, and what sort of objective synthesis is *that*? but anyway).

it comes down partly to a question of agency. i'm not sure if this is even a meaningful statement, but i tend towards most people caring - ie 'something should be done' - if you took them through Grenfell, or asked them specifically.

but yes, i have *somewhat* benign view of 'people' probably based on my socio-economic (and indeed gender) definition.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast still going strong, even after Eddie Mair's departure:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p066rd9t/episodes/downloads

It won gold at the British Podcast Awards but is getting zero promotion by the corporation.

There did seem to be a lot of widespread anger at Grenfell (and again, through what medium could i possibly know that - that mixture of the people i know, my social media vectors, and the mainstream media, and what sort of objective synthesis is *that*? but anyway).

Grenfell will be back, but not yet. British media is exceptionally bad at keeping sustained attention on slow-developing things.

There are a lot of factors behind that, but two key ones are the rules around court reporting - effectively, during a trial you can only report what was said in court on the day and it's very hard to give colour/context/background = often boring stories – and the public's attention, which moves on to things with clearer edges to them and ignores the boring/confusing ones.

This isn't just a Grenfell thing, it's playing out right now in eg the Assange hearings, and people paying close attention to them have despaired at the paucity of coverage it's getting. However, I'd expect them to go big on Jan 4 when the hearing returns and they can add in all the other stuff. (Although Brexit might well take up all the oxygen at that point).

Governments know all this, which is why they drape an inquiry over things they want to buy time on, or get the public to stop caring about. Even though inquiries don't have quite the same reporting restrictions, there's still this sense of "we'll talk about this when the inquiry reports back".

80% of the time, by the time the inquiry reports back, the public doesn't care any more and the government gets away with it. 20% of the time it doesn't. (And if they're certain it's going to fall into the 20%, they do other things to nobble it, like with Chilcott. Hillsborough is a special case but cuts similarly – the Taylor report bought them a bit of time, and did lead to real change, it just avoided actual justice)

I think Grenfell is in the 20% camp. Not just because of the genuine outrage and anger at the events, and the clear villains of the piece, but more coldly because its impact cuts across a lot of society. There are a lot of better-off people in cladded buildings unable to sell their dangerous homes – 20,000 buildings directly, more indirectly. There are very well-off people realising quite how shoddy construction standards have become, too. Sunday Times did a big piece just the week on a big Richmond estate that had a building burn down rapidly and it was all down to shit building regs and inspections, and one of the country's biggest builders was at fault.

I've been trying hard to avoid fire metaphors here, but this has all the hallmarks of something big biding its time.

great post stet, and of course - smacks forehead - i'd forgotten about the court reporting. it was interesting watching the attacking the devil documentary on the Insight team's investigation into Thalidomide, the gyrations they had to perform to manage that sustained campaign. And indeed my point about campaigning came directly from Harold Evans saying in that documentary that the moment when people internally are potentially getting bored with a campaign is exactly the moment you shouldn't give up.

aside from Hillsborough, the other example that springs to mind- for a number of reasons- is bloody sunday tbh

at the end of a marathon effort lessons will have been learned and apologies will issue, the structural (and indeed deliberate/necessary) underpinnings of why these things happen to the people they happen to, where they happen will have transformed sufficiently such that the govt of 2045 can confidently say "never again" and no individuals will be to blame because the situational aspects will have been ignored, disputed or obfuscated for long enough for time and distance to have done their work.

Yes I have a lot to say on that too ofc but I’m lacking Stet’s faith in the process given the government are trying to make Bloody Sunday retroactively legal and the press are doing a lot of work to cover it for them.

yeah I've got no faith in the process — it has evolved as if by design to help cover things up and smother outrage. But that only works if people allow it, and I have a degree of hope that this won't happen in this case.

stonking package on the 10 debunking the social housing “charter” but weirdly nothing about the current inquiry. couldn’t find a link to the video on the BBC News site.

very good and angering summary of the corporate and regulatory responsibility for grenfell by anoosh chakelian in the NS.

Lunchtime update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

Cavity barrier manufacturer says installation of barriers on Grenfell was "some of the worst I have ever seen" pic.twitter.com/L39pnd07dR

— Peter Apps (@PeteApps) March 9, 2021

Chris Mort carried out an examination of the way his product had been installed after the fire in 2018. Says he believes there were areas where the products either weren't fitted at all or stuck on with sillicone instead of fixed with a bracket

unfuckingbelievable. You don't need to be a barriers expert to know that sticking important safety components with fucking silicone is rough as.

well of course hes going to say that, its his product.

I wouldn't expect lying at a public inquiry is beyond the realms of possibility but if the barriers really were stuck on with silicone rather than with the brackets, then he'd right calling it a cowboy installation.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DVUn3zMVoAAEw9n?format=jpg&name=small

lives could have been saved -- but at what cost?

see also, from today

This is such a powerful first-hand account from ⁦@MichaelSchuman⁩. “The state may have prevented COVID deaths better than many liberal democracies. But that success has come at great cost—to human dignity and to the human spirit.” https://t.co/YUZVxydtLC

— Josh Lipsky (@joshualipsky) June 14, 2022

drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,

— wint (@dril) May 9, 2014

strong essay by peter apps on the grenfell enquiry so far:

https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/home/home/the-grenfell-tower-inquiry-has-painted-a-vivid-picture-of-the-world-we-must-leave-behind-76600

Excellent, especially the last few remarks.

This also seems relevant.

How did one of the world’s wealthiest economies end up with housing so unfit for extreme weather? I wrote about how Edwardian moralising, cheap coal and Thatcher's bonfire of housings standards has left British homes unprepared to weather climate change. https://t.co/2eDJLlHb5R

— Phineas Harper (@PhinHarper) July 20, 2022

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/multiple-firefighters-who-saved-lives-28941465

"Up to a dozen firefighters who saved lives at the Grenfell Tower have been diagnosed with cancers; the majority of which are understood to be digestive cancers and leukaemia, for which there is no cure"

:-(

this is doubly grim bcz attached to this particular event but i assume the issue is baked in to all modern fire-fighting