6 ms·

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 al

• 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, ...
  • dom0 9y ago
    Oh well, we did know how well that stuff burns, why it's not used in many countries except Britain, how toxic the fumes are etc. The industry knows how to not build a 70 m matchstick. This is clearly not a case of "but we didn't know!" / "who would think of that happening".
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  • Avshalom 9y ago
    unless the regulations required that it be a firetrap it wasn't due to the regulations.
• civilitty 9y ago
  I agree that specific formulation is asinine but the whole point of regulations is that businesses cannot be trusted to put public welfare above economic incentives. It's not about who is more to blame, it's about the government failing its constituents which is heinous regardless of how many people died. Businesses do immoral shit all the time and while we should punish them accordingly, if the government abdicates its duty in regulating them even that becomes impossible.
• akkartik 9y ago
  It is your comment that is asinine. "Mr. Adam had seen posters hung by the management company telling tenants to shut their doors and stay inside in the event of a fire. But Mr. Adam, his wife, his daughter and his pregnant sister ignored the instructions and ran. "Anyone who listened to the fire brigade and stayed where they are, they lost their lives." If you're consistent, I expect you think the fire brigade is only secondarily at fault for the crap instructions? It was the people's fault for following the crap instructions? Regulations are a device for division of labor and education. They exist partly to tell us what to do so we don't have to understand everything from first principles.
  • ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    Those instructions are sensible, as long as everything else is working as intended. The way the system is supposed to work, fires are contained within individual flats, or a small number of them. The cladding allowed the fire to spread in a way that undermines this system.
  • Spooky23 9y ago
    The fire brigade or other public safety people give out instructions like this because they are looking at preserving life in the aggregate. Panic striken families clogging the single stairway makes it more difficult for first responders to respond. I've been involved in a few minor disasters in 15-25 story high rises. One was a roof fire, another was a kitchen fire halfway up, another was a catastrophic leak of water and glycol from the heating system, and the last was a thick cloud of smoke from a nearby oil-fired power plant that suddenly shutdown during the blackout in 2003. Guess what? There were catastrophic fuckups in every event (fire alarm failure, water pressure failure, firefighters sent to the wrong place, etc). But the SOP was always the same regardless of the situation -- stay in place. At the risk of admitting to being a selfish asshole, I'll come out and say -- fuck that. I will be bugging out, and I'll tell anyone I know to do the same. I'd rather die trying to get out than getting trapped like the poor souls in this building or WTC.
• zethraeus 9y ago
  Regulators must be held accountable for the impact of the incentives they create. Setting those up correctly is their damn job.
• pasbesoin 9y ago
  A relevant excerpt from the article. Leaving aside the well-known problems with the material and prohibitions against using it in this type of application -- in the U.S. and elsewhere -- this was the state of regulation, experience, and response in Britain post-2000: Business-friendly governments in Britain — first under Labor and then under the Conservatives — campaigned to pare back regulations. 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. “If you think more fire protection would be good for U.K. business, then you should be making the case to the business community, not the government,” Brian Martin, the top civil servant in charge of drafting building-safety guidelines, told an industry conference in 2011, quoting the fire minister then, Bob Neill. (“Should we be looking to regulate further? ‘No’ would be my answer,’” Mr. Neill added.) Mr. Martin, a former surveyor for large-scale commercial projects like the Canary Wharf, told his audience to expect few new regulations because the prime minister at the time, David Cameron, wanted to greatly reduce the burden on industry, according to a report by the conference organizers. Two years later, in 2013, a coroner questioned Mr. Martin about the application of building regulations in the case of another London fire, which killed six people and injured 15 others at a public housing complex called Lakanal House. Mr. Martin defended the existing regulations, including the lack of a requirement for meaningful fire resistance in the paneling on the outside of an apartment tower. A questioner told him that the public might be “horrified” to learn that the rules permitted the use of paneling that could spread flames up the side of a building in as little as four-and-a-half minutes. “I can’t predict what the public would think,” Mr. Martin replied, “but that is the situation.” Moving to a requirement that the exterior of a building be “noncombustible,” Mr. Martin said, “limits your choice of materials quite significantly.” After the coroner’s report, a cross-party coalition of members of Parliament petitioned government ministers to reform the regulations, including adding automatic sprinklers and revisiting the standards for cladding. “Today’s buildings have a much higher content of readily available combustible material,” the group wrote in a letter sent in December 2015 that specifically cited the risk of chemicals in “cladding.” “This fire hazard results in many fires because adequate recommendations to developers simply do not exist. There is little or no requirement to mitigate external fire spread,” added the letter, which was first reported last week by the BBC.