The point is that 2 years on and nothing has been done to re-assure occupants of high rise blocks that they are now safe.  Choppers may only be a temporary solution but at least it is a step in the right direction. 

The GLC and fire brigade are sitting back waiting for a report to blame someone instead of getting on and implementing temporary solutions immediately.  No more excuses; please get on and do something to secure the top of these buildings because we are certainly not going to tear the tower blocks down.

Not sure how roof access helps, if we cannot keep the fire from spreading between levels, it won't keep off the roof for long either.  I don't see helicopters as very practical, low visibility landing is not an exact art at the best of times, and the risk of landing on a group of people and killing a few would be a hazard in quite modest  smoke,  and add effect of unpredictable thermal currents up the side of the building and it is potentially suicidal. Being able to drop water on a target area of hundreds of square yards is done from height, not close up.


You may do better with a few escape pods on wires over the side, but I think it is likely to suffer the lifeboat problem of needing duplication on all sides as we don't know in advance which surface will burn, with the added complication for users of not knowing who else was yet to arrive and how long to wait. There is little precedent for it, except possibly the NASA emergency egress system.


I think a more sensible plan is to assure the occupants they are not especially safe, and therefore they should not be complacent, but instead be ready to act as soon as even the smallest fire breaks out. That may mean having some people on fire watch overnight.

waiting for a report to blame someone


p40 in the current Private Eye (1498: 14 to 27 June) has a long article about the cladding material being subsequently tested without identification marking and raising points about the approval process.


Too long to type out here though.


Regards


BOD

The fire safety case of all these building is based on each flat being a safe haven in the event of a fire in another flat.

The cheapest and best solution is to make sure that this is a true assumption.

The design change that undermined this assumption was the external cladding along with plastic window frames so three solutions present themselves:

Hi Harry, Yes, we agree the regulations were a failure but we do not require any reports or who was to be blamed. Fireproof rooms inside tower blocks are a dream not a reality.  The amount of plastics introduced into them by the tenants means they are full of flammable materials and because all the asbestos has been removed then plastic cables, pipes and drainpipes are everywhere.

But the main point is to have a safe area on the roof to which residents above the 10th floor [ which the fire brigade ladders can just reach]  can go if the stairwells are ablaze.  We need to provide some way of getting the residents into a flameproof container on the roof and then down to the ground safely.  Helicopters, ab-sail ropes, parachutes or gliders.  Any other offers??

The amount of flammable material in a flat is not relevant. If there is no source of ignition, i.e. the fire cannot get through the walls, doors and windows then the flat is safe in a fire.

I heard that there is an average of one fire a day in a flat in London but only one, possibly 2 cases in 10 years, has the fire spread to adjacent flats in a catastrophic way so the principle is usually sound. The best solution is to make this principle always effective.

And as for escape up a stair, how many people can climb that many stairs? It is far easier to go down stairs and the stairs should be smoke and fire free zones.

The point is that 2 years on and nothing has been done to re-assure occupants of high rise blocks that they are now safe. 

I'm not sure it's fair to say nothing has been done. Around here, in almost all cases, high rise cladding has been checked and where there was any doubt it has been removed or replaced. AFAIK the only exception are blocks are a very few cases where the building is effectively owned by the occupiers and finding funding to carry out the work is proving difficult.

  - Andy.

Thanks Andy, that is good news. The Barking fire did not cause any casualties so lower level buildings appear to be secure.

I'm not a technical expert but have a lot of experience of the UK's Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations; and would appreciate your views on what I believe to be a largely ignored contributor to the Grenfell Tower fire (for possibly obvious reasons). Specifically, in 2014 the Department for Business (responsible for the FFRs) went out to consultation on a new 'match test' that would have hugely reduced flame retardants in cover fabrics. At the same time, its research and testing had discovered that the current ignition test fails in practice up to around 90%, i.e. UK sofas and mattresses are flammable when believed not to be so. The changes were and are being blocked by the chemical and furniture industry. Under media pressure the Department went out to consultation again in 2016 with the same proposals. However, it is refusing to comment on the consultation returns or say when or if it's going to make safety changes. In the meantime - as demonstrated by the Hull/Stec paper in Chemosphere in December 2017 - a typical UK chemically treated sofa is more dangerous than a non-treated EU sofa, because it gives off vastly more toxic fumes such as hydrogen cyanide almost as soon as it catches fire. All of which means, logic suggests, that the Grenfell Tower fire was a) more toxic than it needed to be, if the Department had made changes in April 2015 as originally proposed, and b) mostly made toxic by burning flame retardants in furniture, not cladding. While cladding was obviously toxic, most of the fumes/smoke would have stayed outside the tower. Once furniture inside it caught fire, the result was huge amounts of toxic fumes/smoke - and it's this that mostly killed people, not cladding effects.