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London High-Rise Fire Tragedy Result of Environmentalist Regulation
The highrise in London which recently burned, killing many was so devastating because it was recently clad with exterior insulation material to make it more energy-efficient.
The fire started in a lower-floor kitchen and rapidly spread up the entire building due to a “chimney effect” caused by the cladding.
Insulation keeps heat in. Basically, they converted the building into a giant kiln.
Jeremy Corbyn blames cuts to local council funding for the tragedy, but this cladding was part of a multimillion-dollar renovation.
About 30,000 other buildings around Britain have also been covered with this insulating cladding.
Published in Environment
Dig this interview with a pastor from near the building, talking about the “issues” with the building. He’s unable to specify what the heck he’s talking about. He just keeps talking about “issues”, resulting from a “policy of austerity”. So much bafflegab. The only specific policy he suggests is rent control! What does that have to do with the fire?!
I was wondering. I hadn’t heard anything about the conditions in Grenfell Tower, other than they had had heating and insulation issues before the renovation.
Maybe NPR crossed wires, too? They definitely talked about tenant complaints about safety, not heating. That could have been connected to lack of sprinklers?
I wish that the news took the time to figure it out and then reported on stories.
Is that too much to ask?
It sounds from what is written here that the outside insulation played a part, but there could be other factors as well.
Regardless, I am very sorry for them. I love London, and I could see in my mind parents desperate to get their kids out of the building, throwing them out of windows to people on the ground. (That was in the NPR story, too.)
And all those people who die of starvation or go hungry because pesticides and chemical treatment of crops are banned and yields go down.
I see all those people liked this. :) Very funny.
I should looked it up to find out what is known now since the article I’m recalling from the Atlantic was published a long time ago. It made a big impression on me at the time. The poor doctor who was studying it died from it.
As I’m looking at Google, however, I’m seeing articles saying that mercury does not cross the blood-brain barrier “efficiently.”
It is, however, toxic, which was my larger point, to the central nervous system:
Assume 30k buildings around Britain with this form of cladding… If so, many buildings could be rapidly burned down with the application of a single molotov cocktail.
If so, this might end up being the next form of terror attack. In terms of deaths per jihadist, it makes sense.
Which has just been advertised throughout the world. Hey, see how easy this is!
Every single building that was covered with this cladding should be redone.
Actually, the problem stems from the nature of the housing itself: the government is a terrible, terrible landlord. Any and all decisions made are not done because of resident willingness to pay for them – instead, all the drivers are governmental in nature.
One can just as easily have a successful public housing building as one can sell a government-made car.
The solution in places like Singapore is that the government builds buildings, and then immediately puts them in “rent to own” systems so that the people who live there have a real stake in the property. Then, too, they also have compulsory military service for the same reason. Neither ore capitalism nor more military nationalism is a foreseeable path in England’s future.
But don’t they have some minimal fire codes in these countries? Things that landlords and government agencies have to comply with?
I was shocked by the different outcome in the Docklands fire in Melbourne in 2014. Same cladding. Big fire. But no deaths. Telling people to stay in a death trap had to play a part in that. And, being a high-end kind of place, the Docklands had sprinklers (although they were removed from the balconies, where that fire started).
This sort of tragedy typically requires a sequence of things to go wrong. Cladding obviously played a big role, but it did not stand alone. Lack of sprinklers, alarms, escape routes, fire planning and appropriate fire response all seemed to be additional combustible elements.
Interesting quote from the fire in Oz:
“Bafflegab” added to personal word-hoard.
Just so no one thinks I’m imagining things here:
This is the woman I read about: Karen Wetterhahn:
I can’t find the original story I read about this for some reason, but I’m sure it talked about the mercury and the brain.
I didn’t recall the facts here accurately, for which I apologize. I should have looked it up.
Anyway, it was a very sad story. And a very small amount of mercury.
Well, you are right about the first part. Private landlords have to follow the rules.
Seawriter
God forbid.
Too bad for those millions of people in Africa and South America eh?
Metallic mercury is much less toxic, unless it is vaporized. touching or ingesting metallic mercury is pretty benign.
I was wondering why I’m not dead.
From the Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/16/london-fire-latest-updates-grenfell-tower-fire-victims/
“It has emerged that there have been no updates to Britain’s building fire safety regulations for more than a decade, even though a number of fires abroad suggested they are out of date.
“Particular concerns have been raised about the cladding [Follow this link for explanation – it’s excellent] on the outside of buildings for a number of years, which experts said might have accelerated the inferno that consumed the block in just 15 minutes. It has since emerged that the United States had banned the type of cladding thought to have been used on Grenfell Tower.”
It wasn’t only the cladding.
Remember it was environmental regulations at why the Columbia fell apart and killed seven astronauts. Environmentalist murder humans and the planet thru neglect so they can feel good about themselves and have something to give meaning to their religious free lives.
Yeah. my dad was chemist. Brought home big bottles of mercury for me to play with. In retrospect the worse thing was when I spilled some on the carpet and mom tried to vacuum it up. Worst. Thing. Possible.
But I don’t think I’m the Mad Hatter….
Does London not have fire codes?
Oh my prediction is, like the pedophile pandemic, May’s goverment will not sack a single public office for incompetence and breaking the fire code laws. I mean if a private owner blatantly ignored fire code and was able to dupe the fire inspectors they would go to jail after an incident like this.
The problem is the fire codes.
Glad you weren’t ingesting it repeatedly. This citation may be of interest: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8355325
(PubMed is great, isn’t it!)
And don’t ya just love Corbyn’s solution:
Jeremy Corbyn: Empty homes owned by rich should be ‘requisitioned’ for Grenfell Tower residents
What has happened in the last ten years that would require an update of fire safety regulations? It is not as if new materials have been invented or something has changed dramatically. Fire safety basics were pretty well set by the end of the 20th century – and really by 1980 or so. The problem is likely less that new regulations are needed than it is the regulations which exist need to be enforced.
Did London’s fire safety regulation really permit flammable cladding to be placed on the outside of buildings? Allowing exterior material that burns easily was established as a bad idea back in 1980, when there were a number of really spectacular apartment fires exacerbated by cedar shingle roofs. I find it hard to believe there were no regulations against it. More likely the cladding was not recognized as flammable or the regulations were ignored in the name of Gaia.
Adding new regulations to be ignored to old regulations being ignored is not the answer. The answer is enforce the existing regulations.
Seawriter
They weren’t breaking the fire code laws (other than the inspection frequency). It’s their fire codes that are the problem.
The cladding was a material that is banned in the US for being flammable. It is here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/15/eight-failures-left-people-grenfell-tower-mercy-inferno/
Never said metallic mercury was benign. Just not the Boogie Man it’s been made out to be. ( Thinking of a time a building was evacuated and Hazmat called because someone broke a thermometer in chem lab..)
Oh. I thought the fire code was supposed to reduce the incidence and impact of fires, not the opposite….