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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
You are only reinforcing the point I made. The problem is not that new regulations are needed. It is that existing regulations need to be enforced.
Seawriter
This fiasco seems a hybrid of Atlas Shrugged and Idiocracy.
Regulations need updating — the banning of certain materials. And the regulations need to be made more flexible so that materials can more easily be added to the list.
One stair well in this building was following code. Would you seriously suggest that one stair well was adequate? Then update the code.
Same for fire doors. Following code not to have them. Which I find really, really strange since I can remember every old hotel I’ve been in had really heavy fire doors that were hard to open. When did that stop?
Same for fire insulation between units.
There are places in Africa where weighing the tradeoffs results in different practices. Not sure about South America. As far as I know people in most countries are being reasonable about the practice. That doesn’t mean they don’t debate where to draw the line between DDT/noDDT, but it’s not a completely binary issue.
If they just finished refurbishing the place, didn’t it get inspected then?
I should add that I’m proud to have worked at the institution where a professor and his students documented the harmful effects of DDT on birds – research that was cited in Rachel Carson’s book. I never met that professor – he didn’t do a lot of work at my workplace even though it includes a bird sanctuary – but I know and have known people who did know him. I’m proud of even that connection to Rachel Carson’s work, though, even though all I can do with it is some name-dropping.
I find it hard to believe London’s fire code permits just one stair well per high rise building, that it does not require fire doors, or that it does not require fire insulation. Those requirements were in fire codes in the 1960s (when I briefly worked for my father, who was an architect). If that is true, then London’s fire code is not ten years out of date, it is 50 years out of date.
If it really is 50 years out of date, then it needed to be updated 25 years ago. But I suspect, when the smoke clears, we will find the building was out of spec for the fire code when it was built, and given exemptions because it was a government building. Which circles back to my argument the problem is enforcing existing regulations.
Seawriter
Interesting.
Seawriter
Are we allowed to take a vote on that?
I’m looking, but so far I don’t see the link between any of the work cited in that paper and the work by George Wallace that was cited by Rachel Carson. I just don’t know the topic that well, but like I say, I’m looking. Nor do I know anything about the quality of the journal.
I know that computer simulations of fires have taken an increasingly prominent role in our understanding of how fires start and spread. I wouldn’t be surprised if the models are still being revised as we learn more about the physics/chemistry of fire propagation.
I don’t know for sure, but I’d wager that new materials have hit the market— perhaps they had been invented more than a decade ago, but sometimes it takes a while for new materials to be commercialized.
The simple fact is that modern tall buildings are close to fireproof absent some total clusterfark like this insulation.
Consider that the WTC towers did not really burn much despite having the most dramatic ignition source one could imagine at the time. The deaths were mainly due to the mechanical destruction of the stairways by the plane impact. The collapse was largely due to the mechanical impact taking out beams and stripping the fireproofing from others followed by softening of the metal. Put another way, you could have put ten thousand gallons of jet fuel on the 80th floor, lit it ablaze, and there would have been very few deaths and the towers might possibly have remained standing.
Because of this high level of resistance to vertical propagation of fire in modern buildings, you have policies such as sheltering in place. Sheltering in place is intended to make it easier for rescue personnel/firefighters to get up to the fire in a building whose constriction does a decent job of preventing floor-to floor fire propagation.
Fire regulations have existed for well over a century. It has been a mature field for over a quarter of a century. Every problem cited for this fire was covered by regulations standard fifty years ago. What caused this fire did not require modern computer simulation to understand. The material used for cladding has been used for decades. New regulations are not needed, and the call for them is just an excuse to cover up the lack of enforcement of existing regulations. (Note – if the existing regulations are inadequate, they are not ten years out of date; they are fifty years out of date.)
Anyone who believes the problem will be solved by new regulations is indulging in magical thinking. If the old regulations were being ignored, the new ones sure as shooting also will be. The only thing new regulations will do is allow those who screwed up to say they have Done Something, and that Something (pinky-swear) will solve all future problems. Until the next fire caused by ignoring the new regulations, just as this one was caused by failure to enforce existing regulations.
Seawriter
We are talking Great Britain here, where the Magna Carta has been removed from the law piecemeal, where the law that set up the first modern patent system has been removed and replaced piecemeal, etc. Why wouldn’t they also remove and replace a sensible fire code with something else?
Hi, I’m a new(ish) member and an architect, so I wanted to clear up some confusion here:
1) The insulation has been used for decades, but its tendency to quickly spread fire vertically has only recently been borne out by example. Fire safety is not “settled science” as long as we have new technologies and new materials. As mentioned in a previous post, most buildings codes in the U.S. do not allow the material on high-rise buildings any more precisely because of these recent catastrophic fires. That’s new regulation responding to a new life safety issue, and it hasn’t happened in the U.K. yet. It apparently also hasn’t yet happened yet with two stairs; that’s not a case of people not following regulation, but of regulation not keeping up with a consensus in fire protection science.
2) There’s a constant misunderstanding of what it means to be “up to code” and I hear this kind of thing all the time. It does not mean (at least in the U.S.), that a building owner must make drastic changes to an already existing structure when new codes come out. Sprinklers is a great example of this: they simply were not common anywhere before the 1970s (another example of fire safety not being “settled science”!) Today, you can’t even build a single-family house in my state without them. But that doesn’t mean somebody came to my house and said “I’m sorry sir, you’re going to need to spend $30K to sprinkler this house…it’s code now!” Codes generally allow existing uses to continue, which is but one example of my final point:
3) Building codes and life safety are, like everything, trade-offs. Saying something is “safe” or “unsafe” is just not accurate. Most small buildings in the U.S. are and have always been made mostly of wood, the least fire-resistant material imaginable. Do we ban them because they can catch fire? Of course not; we limit their size and height and/or require protection of the structure to make sure people have enough time to get out. It’s a balancing of priorities: economical construction vs. absolute fire prevention.
Let me talk it over with the Other Voices in my head and we will get back to you…
The lies of Rachael Carson
So is this the fire code everyone has to abide by or was this a special fire code that was only for government owned/run buildings? Also at what level are fire codes established? Just because an inspector certificates a building does not mean it follows code. It should but if you have a lazy or corrupt inspector like in most nations of the world the code does not mean much.
Referred to as being grandfathered in.
Sea,
You have identified the very root of the problem. Single-minded environmentalist ideologues pushing past truly rational and complete engineering analysis to chase after their green fantasy.
We should never underestimate the danger from these people. They are blind fools who will not listen to reason.
Regards.
Jim
Let’s be clear ddt never actually was harmful to breathing birds. It made shells more brittle in some species therefore resulting fewer eggs making it to hatch. Even then that evidence on that was crap. Plus it has been the WHO policy for around and 10 years to use moderate amounts of ddt in resident areas. So the argument really is now allowing its use in farming again not as mosquito control.
I bit through a thermometer when I was a little kid–watched the little mercury balls bounce all over the place. It wasn’t a thermometer for taking people’s temperature. My grandparents had sent it to me from their Florida vacation to decorate my room. I have no idea why I took it down from the wall and put in my mouth to try take my temperature with it. It was fragile. What a mess.
Those little events that you never forget. :)
I’ve read about half the way through and need to stop for now. So far I see a lot of the same smoke and rhetorical techniques that we get from the defenders of ObamaCare.
I don’t know that that’s true.
That could be an explanation for 1 stairwell and a lack of sprinklers, but I’ve been given the impression that the flammable cladding was a recent addition.
It’s like absolutely every other decision in life. DDT is a medicine with serious side effects. There is no biological free lunch. :)
We have to weigh the dangers of the side effects against the dangers of doing nothing.
I am fan of Rachel Carson. And she advocated for the careful use of DDT when she spoke to Congress. She wanted controls put on its use, saying, paraphrasing, once it is released into the environment, we cannot get it back. Looking at the Strontium 90 case, she was correct.
The EPA did not ban DDT until eight years after she had died of cancer. The DDT-producing companies had a long time to allay the fears about DDT that Rachel Carson expressed in Silent Spring. Its being banned was not her fault, and it’s not what she sought. It became a political issue and was resolved politically, as so many scientific research issues do–vaccines, climate change, antibiotics. When scientists disagree, the politicians step in and make a mess.
I probably have a copy of Carson’s book back from the days when it was rightwingers who were the environmental kooks. But if so, I have no idea where it is. There are bookcases all over our house and some of them aren’t easy to get to. It would be nice to have the book right now to check some of the statements of her critics that don’t seem to portray her views as well as you do.
BTW, I found this student-produced YouTube video about the work of Professor George Wallace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNJ3diDXl-4
I must admit that I don’t like the documentary style and skipped over some of the overly dramatic/emotional stuff that was low on content. (I don’t even like the fact that there exists an Environmental Journalism program, but that’s another issue.) But I enjoyed watching the three MSU professors. I knew Gordon Guyer, but don’t know that he remembered me. (He died recently.) He may have been my boss’s boss for a time, but the org charts were in great flux at the time and I don’t remember for sure. He was quite a character. I don’t remember that I ever met Dick Snider, but I’ve heard others tell how he was a good ally for our off-campus department. I’m trying to remember if he ever taught there summers, but if so, it was before my time. Anyhow, I enjoyed watching his parts on this video.
The video tells how the agricultural and pesticide forces (which are influential in an institutional like ours) were trying to get him [Wallace] fired, or at least discredited.
Theodore Dalrymple’s take:
https://www.city-journal.org/html/flammable-arrogance-15271.html
I am no fan of Rachel Carson. While she may have presented herself carefully to Congress, Silent Spring was a “Chemophobic” alarmist screed far beyond the actual evidence, intended to motivate the gullible to cripple modern society. Just like the “mankind is a plague” true believers’ intent with demonization of CO2 today.
Do you have evidence that she intended to cripple modern society?