5 ms·

Why Grenfell Tower Burned: Regulators Put Cost Before Safety

54 points by Dowwie 9y ago

Theodores 9y ago
Parapet walls are a feature of London that I point out to tourists, explaining the context of 1666: https://www.locallocalhistory.co.uk/schools/preperation/fire-regs.htm https://www.locallocalhistory.co.uk/schools/preperation/fire... 350 years later we find that the lessons learned by our ancestors have been forgotten. There is also the matter of the fridge/freezer, the alleged culprit. I am fairly sure that the fire brigade have got that right, you can trace a fire back to the start, much to the frustration of any arsonist! I am glad it was a fridge and not someone smoking or sitting around with candles. However, I am shocked at people's attitude towards leaving the house with appliances on. Washing machines are known to catch fire, as are tumble driers, but people don't care. I did check the fridge freezer in question to see if it was one of the really stupidly designed ones that have all the gubbins at the bottom rather than the back. Sounds like it was a 'normal' design rather than one of the ones 'specifically designed to catch fire'. The 'easy burn' fridge/freezer variants don't have the cooling metalwork at the back but at the bottom, with a fan to bring air in through a 4" or so high gap at the bottom of the fridge/freezer. What happens with this design is that the dirt and dust that collects on the floor in the kitchen gets sucked in, for the fans to get completely blocked with debris. If you pull off the plastic and get that dirt out it is like emptying the bag from a vacumn cleaner that nobody has emptied in months/years. Nobody thinks to clean out the bottom of these things so after a few years the whole thing gets replaced - warranty expired, too expensive to 'get the man out' to fix it. Only if you are handy with a screwdriver and skint would you deduce and fix the problem yourself. By then the fuse has gone from the motor trying too hard to work so it is easy for the 'technically minded' to replace the fuse and be pleased that their ice cream isn't going to melt. To go to the next step and fix the problem that caused the fuseboard to trip (i.e. dust build up) doesn't happen, instead flipping the fuseboard on becomes just a routine thing you do. I appreciate the action taken in light of Grenfell with Camden council evacuating the towers with the wrong cladding but I think more needs to be done on the fridge/freezer problem, particularly with flawed designs that really are 'built in obsolescence' due to the simple dust build up problem that people just do not know about.
- pja 9y ago
  > There is also the matter of the fridge/freezer, the alleged culprit. Not alleged: It’s known that this is how the fire started. The fire was called in by the resident of the flat when their fridge caught fire. The fire service came, put the fire out in the flat and exited the building. Only at that point did they discover that the fire had spread to the outer skin of the building & they had a major incident on their hands.
Pica_soO 9y ago
Could removing something that endangers your life, from the building you life in- be seen as a pre-selfdefense measure?
imdsm 9y ago
I don't like to get political on HN, so if this appear so, I apologise. The problem, I think, is that people don't want to pay, but people want to spend. We want low taxes but high quality public services. We want low taxes but we want high quality social housing. While the books of a country must be immensely complex, it can be distilled to a very simple money in, money out equation, and when a country is running at a higher money out than money in, you're getting into debt. Cutting this means cutting state funded things, from services to buildings, etc. It's not right to use dangerous materials, but if we have less money to spend, or if we prioritise things wrongly, things like this will happen.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  Countries can run deficits. Countries can inflate away their debts. Countries can stimulate the economy to make it grow quickly enough to outpace the growth of debt. I'd love someone who really believes in the theories behind austerity politics to explain to me how the postwar boom ever happened -- not just in the USA, but all across the Western world and the Asian Tigers.
  - protomyth 9y ago
    Well, you are going to have a bit of trouble with the USA since the postwar budget and taxes corresponds to the start of the boom. President Truman wanted to keep the taxes and budget but the House wouldn't. 1946-48 were pretty interesting years in the US economy. You can also look at the difference between the US government response to 1920 crash and the 1929 crashes.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    You can but you there are limits, if your debt is large enough then you can't outgrow it. Just printing money has it's problems, in this case inflation would make safe building materials more expensive to import. I know people like to bang on about running the economy being different from running your household finances but that only goes so far. The UK is already spending 8% of tax revenue just on servicing debt.
dsr_ 9y ago
Wait, regulators are at fault? No. Whosoever built the firetrap and chose this cladding is primarily at fault. The regulators are secondarily at fault, for allowing it. Arconic is also secondarily at fault, for selling a cladding material that they are required in several nations to warn against using on tall buildings, but did not warn against in the UK. Leading with "it's all the fault of those laws that allowed us to do it" is asinine.
- zucchini_head 9y ago
  It's basically the same situation as to the rampant tax avoidance schemes that are run these days. Who do you blame more, the avoider or the laws they blatantly game? I'de always assign blame and disgust on the avoider or the tower builders/designers, since they are the entities that are _actively_ choosing to cause utter catastrophic social damage to their neighbors around them for cash. But of course, both of these kind of things are set up to be as unaccountable as possible so that once everything hits the fan, you're left with no certain names, no figures, but instead just an unfortunate outcome for those affected and a vague non-court-withholding knowledge of who or what is responsible. In this tower case, everybody knows that it goes right up to the council (who are always involved in these poverty estates), the builders who obviously knew of the dangers, etc. etc., but you'll never hear any names, or any specific group, just a nebulous cloud of blame that enables the perpetrators to carry on as if nobody died or no tax was avoided. Such is humans and life.
- avar 9y ago
  Of course it's the fault of the regulators, a few hundred kilometers east and you wouldn't have been allowed to build the tower like that. The only variable that's different is the regulatory environment.
- rwmj 9y ago
  I think the true answer is: we don't know yet if it was due to bad regulations, building contractors ignoring regulations, inspections not happening, the whole system, ...
  - 9y ago
mc32 9y ago
The tragedy exposes some interesting data: Fire deaths per thousand are lower in the UK compared to the US due to fire regulation --which are a result of lessons learned from The Great Fire, on the other hand the materials they used on that building (as well as some other UK blds) are banned in most advanced economies. Additionally, the manufacturer states the cladding should not be used on anything higher than a ladder engine can reach. So while the material is a poor choice in any regard, the builder was egregious in utilizing it on a structure where ladder engines could not reach the highest floors.
jstalin 9y ago
Maybe someone in the UK can answer this, but how on earth are fire sprinklers not required?
- myguysi 9y ago
  From what I understand the apartments were meant to be "self contained" so in the event of a fire it would be contained long enough for the fire service to respond. It spread from the outside cladding
- rjsw 9y ago
  The tower block wasn't originally built with the cladding that burnt. The idea was that the tower is almost all concrete, a fire on any one floor shouldn't spread as there is little to burn. The problem is that later modifications to the heating system and the addition of the cladding have changed the design a lot.
  - _delirium 9y ago
    Fwiw regulations actually have been getting more conservative on this. There was more confidence in the 1970s (when this tower was built) that modern concrete construction didn't require sprinklers. With the core construction material itself not flammable, and serving as fireproof separation between units, fires were supposed to be contained by design, with spread unit-to-unit throughout the building (especially so rapidly that it'd happen before fire services could arrive) not being possible due to passive suppression, and therefore not in need of active suppression. Which as you say may even have been true with the original design prior to interior ducting and exterior cladding changes. In any case, in the past 10 years the consensus has been changing towards it being prudent to just always require sprinklers in high-rise towers. Scotland began requiring them in 2005, and England in 2007, but neither law is retroactive.
- pja 9y ago
  Originally the tower was built out of concrete & the outer skin of the building was glass, steel (windows & frames) & concrete. The safety case for the building was that no fire could escape a single unit, or worst case a single floor as everything in-between the flats in the building was completely non-combustible. Hence the advice to stay in place until the fire service had put any fire that happened to start in the block. Originally it was a safe building, even without sprinklers: there have been many fires (inevitably) over the years in similar buildings which have never spread, because it was impossible for them to do so. Sprinkler systems would have made them safer & perhaps saved individual lives in the past but at no time were entire buildings at risk because of the lack of sprinkler systems, because it wasn’t possible for them to burn. Unfortunately, covering the building in flammable insulation (!) and even more flammable rain cladding (!!) completely broke this safety case, turning the building into a death trap.
matt4077 9y ago
It's quite obviously a result of the asinine narrative of how "regulations are strangling businesses"–see quote below. There's nothing wrong with naming specific regulatory requirements that you believe are onerous. But repeating the generic attack on any and all regulations is just a populistic attempt to hollow out the power of government, and leads to such disasters, and many smaller injuries to people, property, or the environment that don't get this sort of publicity. A 2005 law known as the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order ended a requirement for government inspectors to certify that buildings had met fire codes, and shifted instead to a system of self-policing. Governments adopted slogans calling for the elimination of at least one regulation for each new one that was imposed, and the authorities in charge of fire safety took this to heart.
- dom0 9y ago
  > to hollow out the power of government, It's important to remember that in many matters, the government are the people.
- jfnixon 9y ago
  It is entirely possible to believe "regulations are strangling business" and that some regulations are necessary. For example, it is reasonable to require fire suppression systems in multistory buildings and reasonable to mock the regulations requiring magicians to file written disaster safety plans for their rabbits. The set of people who object to, and I quote, "any and all regulations," endquote, is an extremely small subset of the electorate.
jostmey 9y ago
I wonder where the boiling point lies--where the lower class, without opportunity and safety decides to overthrow the current political systems. It happens over the course of history, and many societies are slowly inching toward political revolution
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  The boiling point is at 1 camera per house.
- rwmj 9y ago
  I don't know, but it does look as if the UK is undergoing an experiment to find out. As someone living in the UK, this chaotic government is shameful.
- s_kilk 9y ago
  I suspect we may be close to it. There is a palpable anger, all throughout the UK right now, directed against the ruling class. We've all known instinctively that the ruling class don't care about us, but now it's real and painfully visible.
- dom0 9y ago
  The climate feels to me like most of Europe has stabilized a lot in the last year or so, while Britain turned the pressure cooker to 11.
pmoriarty 9y ago
This reminds me of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire[1], where owners also put profits before safety. "The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911 was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in US history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers -- 123 women and 23 men -- who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths ... "Because the owners had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits -- a then-common practice to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft -- many of the workers who could not escape from the burning building simply jumped from the high windows. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Company
- zkms 9y ago
  The tragic thing is that the wet-pipe fire sprinkler has existed for around 140 years -- this is 1880s-vintage technology! The fundamental design is very simple -- a network of pipes, pressurised with water (from a tank or the municipal water supply and individual and replaceable sprinkler heads, each with its own heat-activated valve (initially with a melting fusible link, in 1922, the glass-bulb sprinkler was released) and deflector. The alarm valve, which activates a bell once water is flowing inside the system came later, in the 1890s. Nothing else can get extinguishing agent onto fire faster than a sprinkler system. A room can flash over in a little over two minutes, and not even the best fire brigade can get there that fast. A hundred litres of water per minute per tripped sprinkler head (and sprinklers will have activated well before the room they're in flashes over) puts an end to most fires with extreme prejudice. If the fire hasn't gone out by the time the fire brigade pulls up, the firefighters can hook up their pumps to external connections to the sprinkler network, which will increase the water pressure/flow inside the sprinkler pipes to get more water onto the offending blaze. This is not newfangled experimental nonsense, this is boring, well-established, and reliable technology. Sprinklers control fires so well, even in unsafe buildings, to the point that some designers neglect passive fire protection -- it's a bad idea to to depend on a single mechanism for critical applications like fire safety since there's always the possibility of the fire sprinkler system being manually turned off or otherwise malfunctioning. Fire deaths in buildings with operating fire sprinkler systems are rare (http://www.nfpa.org/~/media/files/news-and-research/fire-statistics/fire-protection-systems/ossprinklers.pdf?la=en http://www.nfpa.org/~/media/files/news-and-research/fire-sta...), there's about 80% less fatalities and almost all fatalities in sprinklered buildings are of victims who were present at the location the fire started -- sprinklers can't undo the damage from the event that started the fire. Most fire deaths are avoidable with century-old technology. It's tragic and depressing to see the never-ending trickle of fire fatalities (punctured by ghastly mass casualty incidents like the Grenfell fire) knowing that around 80% of them would have made it out alive had they been in a building with a functioning sprinkler system. This should be a well-solved problem, for fuck's sake, there's no technical reason why most occupied buildings connected to a municipal water system can't have some bloody sprinklers. Grenfell tower should have had sprinklers, the Triangle Shirtwaist building should have had sprinklers, and it's a failure of society that every building built less than a century ago and connected to municipal water supply doesn't have sprinklers.

54 points by Dowwie 9y ago

Parapet walls are a feature of London that I point out to tourists, explaining the context of 1666: https://www.locallocalhistory.co.uk/schools/preperation/fire-regs.htm https://www.locallocalhistory.co.uk/schools/preperation/fire... 350 years later we find that the lessons learned by our ancestors have been forgotten. There is also the matter of the fridge/freezer, the alleged culprit. I am fairly sure that the fire brigade have got that right, you can trace a fire back to the start, much to the frustration of any arsonist! I am glad it was a fridge and not someone smoking or sitting around with candles. However, I am shocked at people's attitude towards leaving the house with appliances on. Washing machines are known to catch fire, as are tumble driers, but people don't care. I did check the fridge freezer in question to see if it was one of the really stupidly designed ones that have all the gubbins at the bottom rather than the back. Sounds like it was a 'normal' design rather than one of the ones 'specifically designed to catch fire'. The 'easy burn' fridge/freezer variants don't have the cooling metalwork at the back but at the bottom, with a fan to bring air in through a 4" or so high gap at the bottom of the fridge/freezer. What happens with this design is that the dirt and dust that collects on the floor in the kitchen gets sucked in, for the fans to get completely blocked with debris. If you pull off the plastic and get that dirt out it is like emptying the bag from a vacumn cleaner that nobody has emptied in months/years. Nobody thinks to clean out the bottom of these things so after a few years the whole thing gets replaced - warranty expired, too expensive to 'get the man out' to fix it. Only if you are handy with a screwdriver and skint would you deduce and fix the problem yourself. By then the fuse has gone from the motor trying too hard to work so it is easy for the 'technically minded' to replace the fuse and be pleased that their ice cream isn't going to melt. To go to the next step and fix the problem that caused the fuseboard to trip (i.e. dust build up) doesn't happen, instead flipping the fuseboard on becomes just a routine thing you do. I appreciate the action taken in light of Grenfell with Camden council evacuating the towers with the wrong cladding but I think more needs to be done on the fridge/freezer problem, particularly with flawed designs that really are 'built in obsolescence' due to the simple dust build up problem that people just do not know about.

pja 9y ago
> There is also the matter of the fridge/freezer, the alleged culprit. Not alleged: It’s known that this is how the fire started. The fire was called in by the resident of the flat when their fridge caught fire. The fire service came, put the fire out in the flat and exited the building. Only at that point did they discover that the fire had spread to the outer skin of the building & they had a major incident on their hands.

Pica_soO 9y ago

Could removing something that endangers your life, from the building you life in- be seen as a pre-selfdefense measure?

imdsm 9y ago

I don't like to get political on HN, so if this appear so, I apologise. The problem, I think, is that people don't want to pay, but people want to spend. We want low taxes but high quality public services. We want low taxes but we want high quality social housing. While the books of a country must be immensely complex, it can be distilled to a very simple money in, money out equation, and when a country is running at a higher money out than money in, you're getting into debt. Cutting this means cutting state funded things, from services to buildings, etc. It's not right to use dangerous materials, but if we have less money to spend, or if we prioritise things wrongly, things like this will happen.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Countries can run deficits. Countries can inflate away their debts. Countries can stimulate the economy to make it grow quickly enough to outpace the growth of debt. I'd love someone who really believes in the theories behind austerity politics to explain to me how the postwar boom ever happened -- not just in the USA, but all across the Western world and the Asian Tigers.
- protomyth 9y ago
  Well, you are going to have a bit of trouble with the USA since the postwar budget and taxes corresponds to the start of the boom. President Truman wanted to keep the taxes and budget but the House wouldn't. 1946-48 were pretty interesting years in the US economy. You can also look at the difference between the US government response to 1920 crash and the 1929 crashes.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  You can but you there are limits, if your debt is large enough then you can't outgrow it. Just printing money has it's problems, in this case inflation would make safe building materials more expensive to import. I know people like to bang on about running the economy being different from running your household finances but that only goes so far. The UK is already spending 8% of tax revenue just on servicing debt.

dsr_ 9y ago

Wait, regulators are at fault? No. Whosoever built the firetrap and chose this cladding is primarily at fault. The regulators are secondarily at fault, for allowing it. Arconic is also secondarily at fault, for selling a cladding material that they are required in several nations to warn against using on tall buildings, but did not warn against in the UK. Leading with "it's all the fault of those laws that allowed us to do it" is asinine.

zucchini_head 9y ago
It's basically the same situation as to the rampant tax avoidance schemes that are run these days. Who do you blame more, the avoider or the laws they blatantly game? I'de always assign blame and disgust on the avoider or the tower builders/designers, since they are the entities that are _actively_ choosing to cause utter catastrophic social damage to their neighbors around them for cash. But of course, both of these kind of things are set up to be as unaccountable as possible so that once everything hits the fan, you're left with no certain names, no figures, but instead just an unfortunate outcome for those affected and a vague non-court-withholding knowledge of who or what is responsible. In this tower case, everybody knows that it goes right up to the council (who are always involved in these poverty estates), the builders who obviously knew of the dangers, etc. etc., but you'll never hear any names, or any specific group, just a nebulous cloud of blame that enables the perpetrators to carry on as if nobody died or no tax was avoided. Such is humans and life.
avar 9y ago
Of course it's the fault of the regulators, a few hundred kilometers east and you wouldn't have been allowed to build the tower like that. The only variable that's different is the regulatory environment.
rwmj 9y ago
I think the true answer is: we don't know yet if it was due to bad regulations, building contractors ignoring regulations, inspections not happening, the whole system, ...
- 9y ago

mc32 9y ago

The tragedy exposes some interesting data: Fire deaths per thousand are lower in the UK compared to the US due to fire regulation --which are a result of lessons learned from The Great Fire, on the other hand the materials they used on that building (as well as some other UK blds) are banned in most advanced economies. Additionally, the manufacturer states the cladding should not be used on anything higher than a ladder engine can reach. So while the material is a poor choice in any regard, the builder was egregious in utilizing it on a structure where ladder engines could not reach the highest floors.

jstalin 9y ago

Maybe someone in the UK can answer this, but how on earth are fire sprinklers not required?

myguysi 9y ago
From what I understand the apartments were meant to be "self contained" so in the event of a fire it would be contained long enough for the fire service to respond. It spread from the outside cladding
rjsw 9y ago
The tower block wasn't originally built with the cladding that burnt. The idea was that the tower is almost all concrete, a fire on any one floor shouldn't spread as there is little to burn. The problem is that later modifications to the heating system and the addition of the cladding have changed the design a lot.
- _delirium 9y ago
  Fwiw regulations actually have been getting more conservative on this. There was more confidence in the 1970s (when this tower was built) that modern concrete construction didn't require sprinklers. With the core construction material itself not flammable, and serving as fireproof separation between units, fires were supposed to be contained by design, with spread unit-to-unit throughout the building (especially so rapidly that it'd happen before fire services could arrive) not being possible due to passive suppression, and therefore not in need of active suppression. Which as you say may even have been true with the original design prior to interior ducting and exterior cladding changes. In any case, in the past 10 years the consensus has been changing towards it being prudent to just always require sprinklers in high-rise towers. Scotland began requiring them in 2005, and England in 2007, but neither law is retroactive.
pja 9y ago
Originally the tower was built out of concrete & the outer skin of the building was glass, steel (windows & frames) & concrete. The safety case for the building was that no fire could escape a single unit, or worst case a single floor as everything in-between the flats in the building was completely non-combustible. Hence the advice to stay in place until the fire service had put any fire that happened to start in the block. Originally it was a safe building, even without sprinklers: there have been many fires (inevitably) over the years in similar buildings which have never spread, because it was impossible for them to do so. Sprinkler systems would have made them safer & perhaps saved individual lives in the past but at no time were entire buildings at risk because of the lack of sprinkler systems, because it wasn’t possible for them to burn. Unfortunately, covering the building in flammable insulation (!) and even more flammable rain cladding (!!) completely broke this safety case, turning the building into a death trap.

matt4077 9y ago

It's quite obviously a result of the asinine narrative of how "regulations are strangling businesses"–see quote below. There's nothing wrong with naming specific regulatory requirements that you believe are onerous. But repeating the generic attack on any and all regulations is just a populistic attempt to hollow out the power of government, and leads to such disasters, and many smaller injuries to people, property, or the environment that don't get this sort of publicity. A 2005 law known as the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order ended a requirement for government inspectors to certify that buildings had met fire codes, and shifted instead to a system of self-policing. Governments adopted slogans calling for the elimination of at least one regulation for each new one that was imposed, and the authorities in charge of fire safety took this to heart.

dom0 9y ago
> to hollow out the power of government, It's important to remember that in many matters, the government are the people.
jfnixon 9y ago
It is entirely possible to believe "regulations are strangling business" and that some regulations are necessary. For example, it is reasonable to require fire suppression systems in multistory buildings and reasonable to mock the regulations requiring magicians to file written disaster safety plans for their rabbits. The set of people who object to, and I quote, "any and all regulations," endquote, is an extremely small subset of the electorate.

jostmey 9y ago

I wonder where the boiling point lies--where the lower class, without opportunity and safety decides to overthrow the current political systems. It happens over the course of history, and many societies are slowly inching toward political revolution

Pica_soO 9y ago
The boiling point is at 1 camera per house.
rwmj 9y ago
I don't know, but it does look as if the UK is undergoing an experiment to find out. As someone living in the UK, this chaotic government is shameful.
s_kilk 9y ago
I suspect we may be close to it. There is a palpable anger, all throughout the UK right now, directed against the ruling class. We've all known instinctively that the ruling class don't care about us, but now it's real and painfully visible.
dom0 9y ago
The climate feels to me like most of Europe has stabilized a lot in the last year or so, while Britain turned the pressure cooker to 11.

pmoriarty 9y ago

This reminds me of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire[1], where owners also put profits before safety. "The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911 was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in US history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers -- 123 women and 23 men -- who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths ... "Because the owners had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits -- a then-common practice to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft -- many of the workers who could not escape from the burning building simply jumped from the high windows. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Company

zkms 9y ago
The tragic thing is that the wet-pipe fire sprinkler has existed for around 140 years -- this is 1880s-vintage technology! The fundamental design is very simple -- a network of pipes, pressurised with water (from a tank or the municipal water supply and individual and replaceable sprinkler heads, each with its own heat-activated valve (initially with a melting fusible link, in 1922, the glass-bulb sprinkler was released) and deflector. The alarm valve, which activates a bell once water is flowing inside the system came later, in the 1890s. Nothing else can get extinguishing agent onto fire faster than a sprinkler system. A room can flash over in a little over two minutes, and not even the best fire brigade can get there that fast. A hundred litres of water per minute per tripped sprinkler head (and sprinklers will have activated well before the room they're in flashes over) puts an end to most fires with extreme prejudice. If the fire hasn't gone out by the time the fire brigade pulls up, the firefighters can hook up their pumps to external connections to the sprinkler network, which will increase the water pressure/flow inside the sprinkler pipes to get more water onto the offending blaze. This is not newfangled experimental nonsense, this is boring, well-established, and reliable technology. Sprinklers control fires so well, even in unsafe buildings, to the point that some designers neglect passive fire protection -- it's a bad idea to to depend on a single mechanism for critical applications like fire safety since there's always the possibility of the fire sprinkler system being manually turned off or otherwise malfunctioning. Fire deaths in buildings with operating fire sprinkler systems are rare (http://www.nfpa.org/~/media/files/news-and-research/fire-statistics/fire-protection-systems/ossprinklers.pdf?la=en http://www.nfpa.org/~/media/files/news-and-research/fire-sta...), there's about 80% less fatalities and almost all fatalities in sprinklered buildings are of victims who were present at the location the fire started -- sprinklers can't undo the damage from the event that started the fire. Most fire deaths are avoidable with century-old technology. It's tragic and depressing to see the never-ending trickle of fire fatalities (punctured by ghastly mass casualty incidents like the Grenfell fire) knowing that around 80% of them would have made it out alive had they been in a building with a functioning sprinkler system. This should be a well-solved problem, for fuck's sake, there's no technical reason why most occupied buildings connected to a municipal water system can't have some bloody sprinklers. Grenfell tower should have had sprinklers, the Triangle Shirtwaist building should have had sprinklers, and it's a failure of society that every building built less than a century ago and connected to municipal water supply doesn't have sprinklers.