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The Grenfell Tower inquiry is uncovering a major corporate scandal

464 points by VieEnCode 6y ago

Pfhreak 6y ago
Highly recommend checking out "Well There's Your Problem" which is a podcast/YouTube series on engineering disasters. They have an episode on Grenfell, specifically, and give some engineering details on how the fire got so bad so quickly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epkCrB8aKXA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epkCrB8aKXA
- robocat 6y ago
  Skip forward to 44:00 for the discussion of the design of the cladding, then the discussion proper on direct cause & effect starts about 52:00. The first 3/4 hour is mostly history with a political bent, which although it is interesting, it is a bit waffling. At one point they allude to the Estonia Agreement 1995 which has nothing to do with the fire but is interesting: https://www.newstatesman.com/node/195304 https://www.newstatesman.com/node/195304
- oasisbob 6y ago
  That podcast is fun, but it's only really superficially about engineering disasters. They even admit this in one of the early episodes, something like "surprise! This isn't about engineering, we're really doing a personality-driven conversational play!" Most topics are only superficially researched and even more thinly presented. Having 5-10 minutes of information in a two hour episode is usually too little for my tastes.
chaz6 6y ago
The BBC has been reporting on the Grenfell enquiry and has so far published 138 episodes of its podcast. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p066rd9t https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p066rd9t
- edh649 6y ago
  I would highly highly recommend this podcast. I've listened to every single episode from phase 2 (from episode 114), and a large majority of those from phase 1. I believe listening to this podcast should almost be mandatory for any engineer involved with any form of safety system. For those interested in the engineering side of the scandal, phase 2 is amazing listening. The amount of detail the enquiry goes into is incredible. The number of failings across the construction industry with this project from architecture to fire consultants to insulation providers is shocking, but despite this you can also see why those failings occured at the time. The enquirers are knowledgeable and ask extremely probing questions, you can almost hear witnesses squirm. Phase 1 is worth listening to part of, it's all about what happened on the night, the fire service response and failings, call center communication, broken lifts, inadequate equipment and more. However, it is very heavy and depressing listening, and quite repetitive (Phase 1 the podcast was done each day of the enquiry, phase 2 is done weekly).
  - jka 6y ago
    Do you remember whether there's much coverage of the vendor selection and evaluation process that led to the choice of cladding? One suspicion I have is that these companies may rebrand and continue to operate under different names. What I wonder as a result is: when future evaluation processes take place, would decision-makers make the connection to formerly-operating-as company names? I think and hope that the processes are thorough enough to uncover simple avoidance techniques like that, but I also think it's wise not to assume that the process is foolproof. (I'd also wonder whether many web search engines currently perform this kind of second-order entity name resolution automatically)
    - edh649 6y ago
      There certainly is! Initial architecture selections were based around appearance and price, and in fact specified a zinc fire-resistant cladding. But due to ‘value engineering’ (read: cost cutting) this was switched to aluminium (flammable) cladding. The architects didn’t specify exact materials, they thought this would be done by the design and build contractors, who knew nothing about cladding and outsourced. The facades contractor got a heavily discounted price from the cladding suppliers, but didn’t believe it was their responsibility to check it met fire regulations, especially considering the cladding promotional literature said it was suitable. Then, pet way through the building process there was a shortage of the original insulation, and so another insulation was substituted in. At no point were the engineers/designers informed, and the on site surveyor from building control did not realise. In addition to this the installers were installing things the wrong way round, upside down, improperly cut and attached etc. The failings go on and on... Re rebranding I think the industry would be aware enough. Despite the tests having been frauded previously, they would need to be redone under new company names at great expense, fraudulently or not. The more likely course I suspect is companies rebranding existing products and claiming new chemical formulas. (As was already done by Celotex: https://www.bdonline.co.uk/insulation-used-on-grenfell-refurb-was-rebranded-as-safe/5108986.article https://www.bdonline.co.uk/insulation-used-on-grenfell-refur...)
akadruid1 6y ago
There's significant political interest in finding a corporate scandal here. This was a building full of poor people in one of the richest areas in the world. The local government pushed the installation of the cladding for aesthetic reasons and ignored serious safety complaints from the residents. The national government voted against banning this cladding - and many of the MPs who voted against are landlords who had a financial interest.
- teucris 6y ago
  I don’t see how exposing a corporate scandal helps politicians whose job it is to pass laws to keep this kind of thing from happening. The article itself says that these companies sold their products in the UK because the regulations were lagging behind. Can’t it be both a government and a corporate scandal?
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Attention is a limited resource, both on the individual level and the aggregate. If your investigation uncovers a corporate scandal, it limits the ability of the public to focus on the government failings.
    - dash2 6y ago
      That seems unlikely. If this blows up in the press, people will become more interested in both corporate and government failings - which are deeply intertwined in this case, anyway.
  - KaiserPro 6y ago
    The regulation is fine. Its the policing. Companies were allowed to change fire tests to make their products look better. I honestly can't see how on earth this is was allowed. It was always my understanding that you had to submit your product to a third party for testing, and that third party was vetted. Then there is the low grade corruption endemic in construction in the UK. The fact that large councils have Quantity surveyors on a percentage fee, rather than a fixed fee, is a big problem.
jollofricepeas 6y ago
Greed and hubris is good. This story reminds me a lot of the recent documentary, Challenger: Final Flight produced by JJ Abrams on Netflix. “There’s pressures of budget, there’s pressures of schedule,” he said. “And then there’s all these people, these men and women down the chain, who get stuck and saddled with the results of those decisions.” I can’t help but see a pattern here. - Big Tobacco - US opioid crisis - Challenger disaster - Grenfell - Nazi Germany To paraphrase Baldwin: “Tragedy is not caused by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”
- deleted 6y ago
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- PaulHoule 6y ago
  I'll point out the space shuttle disasters as being particularly misunderstood. The real mistake happened around 1976 when they settled on the basic design which they estimated had a 2-3% chance of blowing up on any launch. Every other manned space vehicle has had an emergency escape for the crew. An emergency escape system could have saved the lives of the Challenger crew because they survived the external tank explosion (were killed when the crew compartment hit the ocean) -- they thought about putting one in, but then they wouldn't have had space in the hatchback for a satellite. The thermal tiles were also "unsafe at any speed", it was known at the beginning that the tiles would get broken or fall off sometime and there was a lot of nail-biting around the first flights, but after "it" didn't happen a few times people started to relax. Sociologist Dianne Vaughn popularized the term "Normalization of Deviance" in connection with the Challenger Disaster but it has been greatly misunderstood with the public. Today people think it is the doctor not washing his hands and not being confronted by the nurse about it, but in the case of NASA it is a formal process where they make a list of 200 unacceptable situations about the space shuttle that they make the case they can squeak by one by one and each speaker has a few minutes to make a case and if they had bad slides and didn't make a good point they would clear the floor for the next "catastrophe". "Normalization of Deviance" is a regular procedure with dangerous technology -- it's the paperwork that they fill out because they put the door frame in the wrong way in the break room at the nuclear powerplant or when they fly a regional jet back from a regional airport with one angle-of-attack sensor down because it can be fixed much more easily at the big airport.
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lopmotr 6y ago
It's funny to think "obviously polyethylene is flammable, how did nobody notice" then realize my own house has expanded polystyrene and polyester fiber batts insulation under the floor. I wondered about fire risk but saw some vague claims by the manufacturers and that the local authority approved them, and just trusted that, despite these local authorities having a history of approving bad products. Decades ago, my dad was very critical of all polymer building insulation because of the fire danger. I thought he was just out of touch and obviously it wouldn't be allowed if it wasn't safe. This isn't the olden days! We're more strictly regulated now!
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  In the case of skyscrapers it breaks the basic safety concept. Fires won't propagate up or down a properly built skyscraper except by the flames lapping up from floor 14 starting a fire on a floor 15.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  Your home is presumably only 2-4 stories. So in the event of a bad fire you just evacuate. Probably the fire can be extinguished, but maybe it can't, either way you aren't inside, your insurer is on the hook for any increase in costs from products that did not perform. Maybe "the invisible hand" will fix that, maybe it won't, but nobody dies. In a high rise residential building it's a nightmare to evacuate, so until that becomes necessary (as it did at Grenfell and one of the other phases looked at whether emergency services were wrong to delay so long and why that happened) the preference is to compartmentalize as you would on a ship (can't evacuate those either). As a result of this approach to fire fighting it's critical that fire cannot spread between compartments. Flat #1 is on fire, a team comes out, they fight the fire, maybe Flat #1 is completely ruined, but the people in Flat #2 are just annoyed by the smell of smoke and the debris, they aren't actually in danger. At Grenfell this cladding meant the fire was able to spread outside the building defeating compartmentalization, in hindsight once that happened it would be impossible to contain it. So the height of the building isn't just why this is news, it's also why it was a problem.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  According to Civil Defense documents, construction post-1945 was considered to be more vulnerable to the thermal and shock effects of nuclear weapons than pre-1945 construction. Plastic materials were a villain. A black polyurethane couch could catch the rays of a H-Bomb fireball 100 kilometers array and within 15 seconds create a fireball in the room. Details like that create a lot of uncertainty about causalities. Closer to home your Fire Marshall could demonstrate for you why you should not smoke in bed or what happens to a car when you light the passenger seat with a Zippo. Common natural materials have safety properties against fire. For instance, if I got too close to a fire, a wool sweater would form a char, "ablating" like the Apollo spacecraft heat shield. An acrylic sweater would melt and probably transfer more heat to my skin and make it more likely that I get burned, if it doesn't ignite itself.
PaulHoule 6y ago
I think it's funny that the "Spectator" was a conservative newspaper long before we had a Republican party in America... And they run articles like this!
- lopmotr 6y ago
  Huh? Because conservatives don't like safety? Or they like dishonest business practices?
  - earhart 6y ago
    American conservatives tend to support freedom of contract and freedom of speech (including dishonest/incomplete speech) - and they consider monetary donations to politicians to be speech. They also tend to believe in supply-side economics (failures are met with “Well, you didn’t cut taxes on the rich enough!”), and the myth of the entrepreneur who singlehandedly builds a business empire (ignoring the myriad ways government supports these activities). So... yes, American conservatives tend to dislike safety (people should be responsible for their own safety, regulation will slow down business and make everyone worse off), and they tend to support dishonest business practices (let the market handle punishment, it’s not the government’s job to decide what truth is and to make sure people are honest).
    - whatthesmack 6y ago
      I get the sense that you're applying your feelings to a group you don't like. As a conservative, I can say that I am interested in safety as much as anyone. I certainly don't want to become a victim of an avoidable incident, and I don't want anyone else to become a victim either. > American conservatives tend to dislike safety (people should be responsible for their own safety, regulation will slow down business and make everyone worse off) People being responsible for their own well-being certainly doesn't imply a dislike of safety. It's acknowledging a reality that ultimately we are responsible for our own fates. And it certainly doesn't rubber-stamp fraud, as is the case here where companies literally lied about the leveling of their product. In addition, it does not allow the government to shirk responsibility for requiring the use of the dangerous product in this case. > it’s not the government’s job to decide what truth is Allowing governments free reign to determine truth has historically led to immense suffering and hundreds of millions of documented deaths.
0xcde4c3db 6y ago
I suppose the $64,000 question is this: how many other Grenfell Towers are out there, and how can they be identified? The scope would probably be pretty clear if it were just a matter of one negligent construction company, but it seems like this is a problem that spans the whole chain of approving, selecting, selling, and installing this product category.
- samizdis 6y ago
  A news report from June of this year suggests a figure of 2,000 other UK buildings affected: https://metro.co.uk/2020/06/12/2000-buildings-still-have-grenfell-cladding-despite-promise-remove-month-12843420/ https://metro.co.uk/2020/06/12/2000-buildings-still-have-gre... Edited to add: The UK government publishes "ACM [aluminium composite material] remediation data" every month. This is "being collected to help the Building Safety Programme make buildings safe and to make people feel safe from the risk of fire, now and in the future". https://www.gov.uk/guidance/aluminium-composite-material-cladding#acm-remediation-data https://www.gov.uk/guidance/aluminium-composite-material-cla...
- DanBC 6y ago
  They are being identified. It's causing problems for some home-owners. https://bylinetimes.com/2020/08/28/the-cladding-trap-thousands-fearful-in-the-shadow-of-grenfell/ https://bylinetimes.com/2020/08/28/the-cladding-trap-thousan...
- walshemj 6y ago
  Lots in my local town there was a new development where a lot of flats and a new hotel have had to have cladding replaced.
- xxpor 6y ago
  Anyone know the status of the legality of similar cladding and insulation in the US?
- postingawayonhn 6y ago
  I haven't been following what's happening in the UK but here in the Australian state of Victoria (we had a couple of cladding fires too) the government established an organisation called Cladding Safety Victoria. They're identifying all buildings with this sort of cladding and coordinating replacement. They just started on my apartment building this week (there's only a small section around the main entry).
tomp 6y ago
key quotes: > Arconic realised its polyethylene-cored cladding had a horrendous reaction to fire following French tests in 2005, where it burned fiercely and obtained a basement ranking of Class E. Despite this, Arconic continued to market it as the much safer Class B > The Irish company Kingspan’s insulation passed one of these tests, which took place on a fake wall made with non-combustible cement. This test pass permitted its use on tall buildings, but only in an exact replica of the system tested. Despite this, the firm marketed its insulation as ‘suitable for use on high-rise buildings’. [...] After the test was passed in 2005, Kingspan altered the chemical composition of the insulation so that it was no longer the same product > Celotex, a smaller firm [...] its insulation had also passed a test, also using a non-combustible cladding panel, and it too began to market its product as safe for use on high rises. But the test was not as it seemed: fire resisting boards were used around the temperature monitors that record the pass or fail, distorting the result. > the Local Authority Building Control [...] appears to have written its certificate simply by copy and pasting an email written by Celotex's Jon Roper, even including the same typo on the certificate. So, among Arconic, Kingspan, Celotex, LABC (or Spectator, if they're pulling a Bloomberg) - I wonder if anyone is going to jail...
- mellosouls 6y ago
  I can't read the article to see if it's mentioned but a reminder that Arconic employees have refused to give evidence: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54792111 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54792111
  - asplake 6y ago
    I wonder if in the long run that will make them easier to prosecute &/or sue. Certainly hope so
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      In the US, refusing to give evidence (taking the fifth) can be used against you in a civil suit, but it cannot be used against you criminally. If you’re facing civil and criminal liability at the same time, this puts you in a tough situation, since protecting yourself from criminal liability might increase your civil exposure. I believe in the UK refusing to give evidence might be worse, both because they have a whole different model of courts (inquisitive vs. adversarial), and because the underpinnings of US legal rights stem from a perceived short coming of the British court system.
joefife 6y ago
Private Eye has been talking about this for over a year. The Page 94 podcast gives a very good account.
- phronesis 6y ago
  Absolutely. Like so many things, Private Eye is ahead of the curve in its reporting. Another podcast worth a mention is James O'Brien's recent Full Disclosure interview with Grenfell survivor Edward Daffern. Horrifying to hear how the residents were treated before, during and after the tragedy, and how predictable the whole thing was.
  - cameronh90 6y ago
    Worth remembering Private Eye are biased towards insinuating institutional corruption, leading to their support of Wakefield against the pharmas in the MMR scandal. They are generally good, but they aren't immune from bias and it still pays to be critical.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      Institutional corruption is such a powerful threat to humans that it pays to be suspicious.
erentz 6y ago
I’m dealing with my own fire safety related conflict at the moment. Maybe I am the asshole in the story but my building recently announced its annual fire inspection to all residents of the ~350 apartments, by email, the day before it was to happen. They said there was no choice. They provided no information about the pandemic response plan of the contractor or the infection control measures they would be taking. Since both myself and my wife are quite serious immunocompromised I objected. I told them I couldn’t let them in with all this lacking and instead to call me when they reached my apartment and we could do it via phone or video call or I could separately take videos of what they need. Now I’ve seen these guys when they do this work before (having lived here for a number of years) and they just open the door step in and then slam it behind them. They don’t knock and wait. It’s absurd. I stuck a notice on my door telling them to call or video call first when arriving. They didn’t enter but didn’t call. Fast forward a week. They’re now giving me notice they’ll come in against my objection. They won’t answer any questions about the pandemic response plan or what vetting they did of their contractor and it seems the contractor doesn’t have one (or it’s embarrassingly bad). They said for PPE they use cloth masks, which are quite inadequate for protecting us. They said they take their temperatures but as the UK’s Chochrane review showed that is next to useless in screening infected people. I provided thorough videos of me testing every alarm in the apartment and showing every sprinkler head in detail. I captured a video of the building alarms sounding in every room on the day of the inspection. They will not view these and tell me what is inadequate about them. They simply say they must do a physical inspection but won’t tell me who says or what regulation says it must be physical. Now by my very napkin math these inspectors - if they’re doing inspections like this day in day out - could comfortably enter up to a thousand homes in a week. In the middle of the worst peak yet in this pandemic. Without proper protection for both protecting themselves and if they are infected from protecting the occupants. And without any testing regime in place to catch them early if they are sick. No plan in place to notify buildings or residents they have visited if an employee does get sick. None of that. They don’t even ask the residents if they have any symptoms or are sick before barging in. It seems like a high risk job and a poorly controlled vector of transmission. Entirely because the corporate landlord is lazy and doesn’t care. And the fire inspection contractor company is lazy and doesn’t care. And they can all get away with being lazy and not caring.
- 6y ago
bjornsing 6y ago
”Celotex even inquired about using the [Grenfell] tower as a case study for the suitability of its product for high rises. So it has turned out, although not in the way the company hoped.” To say the least... :(
chiph 6y ago
The American Society of Civil Engineers had a presentation from Dr. Angus Law, a UK lecturer in fire safety engineering. There are lots of engineering details covered about why it spread so quickly (approx. 30 minutes from a single room fire on the 3rd floor to reaching the top of the building) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N6eeNjbVws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N6eeNjbVws
ppod 6y ago
Might be reading too much into this, but I think there are a few layers going on here politically. Grenfell has been held up as an example of the failure and incompetence of successive Conservative governments. The Spectator and The Times are both publications that would be seen as centre-right and more Tory-friendly than most, and they both have stories today very pointedly (and totally correctly) blaming the Irish company Kingspan and this French company. Things are especially tense between the French, the Irish, and the British (especially the Conservatives) because of the Brexit crunch talks. They are completely right to point at these companies, and the Irish media has totally failed on this story: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/construction/the-irish-times-business-person-of-the-month-gene-murtagh-1.4369658 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/construction/the-irish-t... But I think there is an underlying reason why the national adjectives are sprinkled all through these articles.
dopylitty 6y ago
It's important to realize even if there was specific malfeasance in the companies involved in this particular event the problems are systemic. We are part of an economic system that values profits for a small number of people above safety or quality. While it's important to punish those who behave unethically a better response would be to change the system so that ethical behavior and the pursuits of safety and quality are valued above the pursuit of wealth.
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  I'll take the bait: How do you propose we do that, if all currently known systems of government are insufficient?
  - shmageggy 6y ago
    Not OP, but I don’t read it as bait, and I don’t think having a solution in mind is a prerequisite for noting a problem. As for your question, ideas like UBI, post-growth capitalism, etc seem to move towards relaxing the ethics vs profit dilemmas that systematically drive these disasters (as well as most of the other slow-motion disasters like climate change, biodiversity loss, etc).
  - acdha 6y ago
    You’re just repeating Tyler Cowen’s libertarian fallacy of assuming the quality of government is constant. A far more interesting question would be testing that belief, which could then lead to you learning which countries do better and why.
  - dash2 6y ago
    Perhaps rather than focusing on very broad systems of government, we could look at changing the system of fire regulation and inspection. There's ground in between "blame individuals" and "blame capitalism".
- Camas 6y ago
  Fire related deaths have been falling for decades in the UK so that system must be working.
ourcat 6y ago
An additional scandal is the extortionate costs for buildings over a certain height in obtaining an EWS1 Form to show to mortgage lenders. Without which, your appartment is effectively valued at zero, since you'll never be able to sell it.
- easytiger 6y ago
  Yea. The difficulty related to the fact the companies verifying the buildings had understandable difficulty finding insurers to underwrite their opinion. There are plenty of other scandals with which I am familiar where buildings have had huge amounts of completely unjustified work done under bad advice
- jessaustin 6y ago
  After reading TFA and this comment thread, that doesn't seem scandalous at all. It would be evil for lenders to underwrite deathtraps.
  - ourcat 6y ago
    The scandal is that they shouldn't have been allowed to be built with the 'wrong' insulation in the first place. Also, people who have had surveys for properties they bought some years ago (pre-Grenfell) as in my case. So, if the Government are going enforce new standards and impose the need for very costly surveys and 'forms' to show new safety standards (again, based on their own ineptitude that caused Grenfell), then they should be the ones who have to pay for any remediation. Not the Leasholders.
bigbubba 6y ago
Does the government still recommend that people in highrises shelter in place when there is a fire in another apartment in the building? They did before, after this fire I found the cutesy animated videos they published explaining how you should shelter in place because fire is unlikely to spread in a highrise. It seems like bullshit to me. At the first hint of fire in a building, I'll be flying down the nearest staircase that doesn't have smoke coming out of it. I'd not sit around in a burning building waiting to see if the fire gets worse, only to find out I no longer have any options for escape.
- ericbarrett 6y ago
  It’s not clear to me that this is bad advice if safety regulations were followed during construction. Like the 737 MAX, however, rampant unpunished corporate malfeasance has negated it.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    It seems to me that if the high-rise building truly resists the spread of fire, then sheltering in place is probably the optimal solution. However I just can't trust my own life to that. Furthermore one of the hazards used to justify this advice was the possibility that hallways or stairs are already filled with smoke. Well if that's the case, doesn't that perhaps call into question the premise that fires stay contained in these buildings? I found a local copy of the video, it was from the London Fire Brigade and links to the site knowtheplan.co.uk which is now defunct. I can't find the video still on the net, but it might be out there somewhere. Edit: found it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Vy4L8B7KI9k https://youtube.com/watch?v=Vy4L8B7KI9k
    - ericbarrett 6y ago
      Only familiar with US building codes but stairway shafts in taller buildings are supposed to be built from thicker concrete, with fire-rated doors, so theoretically they should remain usable for some time (minutes) even if the floors they pass are engulfed. For larger buildings there must be two or more stairway shafts in case one is compromised. All is negated if doors are propped open, locks defeated, structure altered, building is wrapped in solidified napalm cladding, etc. So I’m with you, I’d also GTFO.
maxehmookau 6y ago
I'm not sure any of this is a surprise. It is surprising to see The Spectator call it out though!
ggcdn 6y ago
> An unforgivably naive market of architects and contractors then began merrily specifying it for a wide range of uses well beyond its original test. Architects are architects, Contractors are contractors, and neither are fire engineers. No one can be an expert on everything. This is why we have building codes, product certification, and engineering assurance process. The problem here appeared to be dishonest players. If certified independent labs were required to test products, and licensed engineers were required to approve the assembly and submit their letters of insurance for the permit, it seems like there would be a net benefit to the public (this is how it works in Canada). If there was a stronger regulatory system, the investigators would be able to look up the letters of assurance for this permit, obtain the project documentation from the responsible engineer, investigate and possible charge him with negligence if he failed to spec a certified fire assembly. It appears that in the UK, there is no clear hierarchy of responsibility. When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. As an aside, Fire rating generally involves more than just a single product - it requires an 'assembly'. That assembly must be recreated every time the product is used to achieve the fire rating. If the testing assembly required 1/2" non-combustible cement backing board, the installation also requires it. It sounds like the fire rated assemblies were not being followed in this case.
- michaelt 6y ago
  > It sounds like the fire rated assemblies were not being followed in this case. The fraud by Celotex and Kingspan is more literal, in this case. The only assemblies that managed to pass the large scale fire test cheated by using a bunch of nonstandard parts, materials that weren't available on the market, and even put kiln insulation material blocking the temperature sensors on the test rig. They then truncated any test reports sent to customers, omitting mention of the cheats. It was literally impossible for any customer to build the assembly that had passed fire testing, as they were never told about the cheats. They then took the reports from these cheated "third party tests" and converted them into certificates from further authorities. And their manufacturers' marketing departments "misunderstood" the test reports and put out marketing material claiming the material was of limited combustibility - which it was not.
mcguire 6y ago
"This chiefly means three products: the actual cladding panels (thin aluminium sheets bonded to a core of polyethylene, a plastic with similar properties to solid petrol) and two forms of combustible foam insulation which were fitted behind it." Cough, cough, cough. Does anyone know the state of liability laws in Britain? Here in the states, the companies involved would be going down in a hail of lawsuits and the industry would be scrambling to distance itself. I wonder what the software development industry would look like under that kind of investigation.
- deleted 6y ago
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- james1071 6y ago
  Not a lawyer - think the main issue will be whether the companies are shown to have manipulated safety testing. If not, then it will be a case of bad rules allowing a bad product to have been used.
- remus 6y ago
  > ...the companies involved would be going down in a hail of lawsuits and the industry would be scrambling to distance itself. I think this is essentially what will happen here. One of the problems is that the remediation work to correct the dangerous cladding runs in to billions of pounds and is a bill none of the individual companies involved can afford, so working out exactly who to sue (with everyone denying liability, of course) is kinda tricky.
- willyt 6y ago
  I’m not a legal expert but here’s my understanding of the process: If a person or group of people take civil action, liability will be determined in the specialist construction courts, typically in construction cases many entities are held jointly liable, so the liability could be shared between the client, architect, fire testing laboratories, fire engineers, contractors and the fire brigade. The court will determine the total damages to be paid. There is a generally agreed amount for loss of life, everything thing else is determined based on the actual cost e.g things like electric wheelchairs for life, temporary accommodation costs, the rebuilding costs etc. Unlike the US, there are no punitive damages in the UK the liability is purely the cost of putting things right. The plaintiff’s lawyers have to be careful not to ask for unreasonable damages as this can negatively affect their case. The court will then apportion the liability to each party. As you can imagine, these cases go into a lot of detail and take years to resolve.
quattrofan 6y ago
Manslaughter charges for the execs should follow.
scraft 6y ago
I and a huge amount of other people are living in a flat which currently has a value of £0 and am currently waiting to find out how much remediation works are going to cost to make the building I live in safe. As it is deemed unsafe by retrospective government fire and safety requirements, it is impossible to get a new mortgage for and therefore impossible to sell. The remediation costs are likely to be in the 10's of thousands of pounds. The building may have been built to meet the requirements at the time (12 years ago) and then again it may not have. The guidelines have also obviously changed since Grenfell. But as it stands right now, all costs are to be passed onto the leaseholder i.e. the person who owns and lives in the flat i.e me. I moved in one year ago, had all the survey's done, used a solicitor and followed all procedure. Other people are in even worse positions, if they can't afford a bill of £50,000 their only option maybe bankruptcy, if they are in various legal professions or an accountant this means automatically losing their license to practice. Other people who have used the governments partial ownership scheme, where you buy 25% of a property and then rent (paying 25% less rent per month) are being asked to pay 100% of the remediation costs. For a lot of people the costs are more than the 25% stake in the property they own. Some property developers followed the guidelines at the time so say it isn't their fault. The government says it followed the standards at the time so it isn't their fault. The building inspectors which failed to properly inspect properties (when there were actual issues outside of what has been changed retrospectively) seem to have immunity against legal action. The cladding companies who made unsafe cladding are trying to weasel their way out of responsibility by saying it is safe in the right circumstances. It feels like there are a few slices of blame to dish out. But one party who has had NO involvement in any of this is the people living in the flats. The most sensible option I have heard suggested so far is that the government pays to clean up this entire scandal, and then puts a levy on property developers making flats so they get a percentage back on each new development to slowly recoup the money. But instead of that, the government is making various noises about wanting to protect leaseholders whilst simultaneously not doing anything concrete, even though as I write this people are already filing bankruptcy, giving up their flat which has all the money they have ever saved in, and on top of that, the remediation work in subject to VAT so the government brings in tax for all work done to fix up this mess. You can track huge sums (millions of pounds) being donated/pumped into the conservative party by property developers, and of course members of the conservative party also have shares or other stakes in property development companies. It is a scandal of the highest order.
AlexMoffat 6y ago
At least none of the top level comments are claiming the invisible hand would solve this if only there were fewer regulations. Better enforcement and more regulations seem from experience to be the only way.
rienbdj 6y ago
RBKC are a really nasty bunch. Just recently they removed a cycle lane from their high street (only one in their borough) after complaints for a few right wing celebrities.
leashless 6y ago
I live in an affected building. AMA.
leashless 6y ago
I live in an affected building in London. AMA.
naringas 6y ago
rich wealthy country corruption: the building gets built and (if)when disaster strikes, the corruption is revealed by broken safety regulations. 3rd world country corruption: the project gets started, maybe they put the first stone in a ceremony. nothing gets built and years later there's an empty lot sitting there.
- wooger 6y ago
  The first case certainly also happens in China and numerous poorer countries. Not just breaking safety regulations, but by literally swapping out concrete in structural support pillars for old oil cans. Or just using a poor concrete mix for everything in the first place.
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464 points by VieEnCode 6y ago

Highly recommend checking out "Well There's Your Problem" which is a podcast/YouTube series on engineering disasters. They have an episode on Grenfell, specifically, and give some engineering details on how the fire got so bad so quickly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epkCrB8aKXA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epkCrB8aKXA

robocat 6y ago
Skip forward to 44:00 for the discussion of the design of the cladding, then the discussion proper on direct cause & effect starts about 52:00. The first 3/4 hour is mostly history with a political bent, which although it is interesting, it is a bit waffling. At one point they allude to the Estonia Agreement 1995 which has nothing to do with the fire but is interesting: https://www.newstatesman.com/node/195304 https://www.newstatesman.com/node/195304
oasisbob 6y ago
That podcast is fun, but it's only really superficially about engineering disasters. They even admit this in one of the early episodes, something like "surprise! This isn't about engineering, we're really doing a personality-driven conversational play!" Most topics are only superficially researched and even more thinly presented. Having 5-10 minutes of information in a two hour episode is usually too little for my tastes.

chaz6 6y ago

The BBC has been reporting on the Grenfell enquiry and has so far published 138 episodes of its podcast. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p066rd9t https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p066rd9t

edh649 6y ago
I would highly highly recommend this podcast. I've listened to every single episode from phase 2 (from episode 114), and a large majority of those from phase 1. I believe listening to this podcast should almost be mandatory for any engineer involved with any form of safety system. For those interested in the engineering side of the scandal, phase 2 is amazing listening. The amount of detail the enquiry goes into is incredible. The number of failings across the construction industry with this project from architecture to fire consultants to insulation providers is shocking, but despite this you can also see why those failings occured at the time. The enquirers are knowledgeable and ask extremely probing questions, you can almost hear witnesses squirm. Phase 1 is worth listening to part of, it's all about what happened on the night, the fire service response and failings, call center communication, broken lifts, inadequate equipment and more. However, it is very heavy and depressing listening, and quite repetitive (Phase 1 the podcast was done each day of the enquiry, phase 2 is done weekly).
- jka 6y ago
  Do you remember whether there's much coverage of the vendor selection and evaluation process that led to the choice of cladding? One suspicion I have is that these companies may rebrand and continue to operate under different names. What I wonder as a result is: when future evaluation processes take place, would decision-makers make the connection to formerly-operating-as company names? I think and hope that the processes are thorough enough to uncover simple avoidance techniques like that, but I also think it's wise not to assume that the process is foolproof. (I'd also wonder whether many web search engines currently perform this kind of second-order entity name resolution automatically)
  - edh649 6y ago
    There certainly is! Initial architecture selections were based around appearance and price, and in fact specified a zinc fire-resistant cladding. But due to ‘value engineering’ (read: cost cutting) this was switched to aluminium (flammable) cladding. The architects didn’t specify exact materials, they thought this would be done by the design and build contractors, who knew nothing about cladding and outsourced. The facades contractor got a heavily discounted price from the cladding suppliers, but didn’t believe it was their responsibility to check it met fire regulations, especially considering the cladding promotional literature said it was suitable. Then, pet way through the building process there was a shortage of the original insulation, and so another insulation was substituted in. At no point were the engineers/designers informed, and the on site surveyor from building control did not realise. In addition to this the installers were installing things the wrong way round, upside down, improperly cut and attached etc. The failings go on and on... Re rebranding I think the industry would be aware enough. Despite the tests having been frauded previously, they would need to be redone under new company names at great expense, fraudulently or not. The more likely course I suspect is companies rebranding existing products and claiming new chemical formulas. (As was already done by Celotex: https://www.bdonline.co.uk/insulation-used-on-grenfell-refurb-was-rebranded-as-safe/5108986.article https://www.bdonline.co.uk/insulation-used-on-grenfell-refur...)

akadruid1 6y ago

There's significant political interest in finding a corporate scandal here. This was a building full of poor people in one of the richest areas in the world. The local government pushed the installation of the cladding for aesthetic reasons and ignored serious safety complaints from the residents. The national government voted against banning this cladding - and many of the MPs who voted against are landlords who had a financial interest.

teucris 6y ago
I don’t see how exposing a corporate scandal helps politicians whose job it is to pass laws to keep this kind of thing from happening. The article itself says that these companies sold their products in the UK because the regulations were lagging behind. Can’t it be both a government and a corporate scandal?
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Attention is a limited resource, both on the individual level and the aggregate. If your investigation uncovers a corporate scandal, it limits the ability of the public to focus on the government failings.
  - dash2 6y ago
    That seems unlikely. If this blows up in the press, people will become more interested in both corporate and government failings - which are deeply intertwined in this case, anyway.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  The regulation is fine. Its the policing. Companies were allowed to change fire tests to make their products look better. I honestly can't see how on earth this is was allowed. It was always my understanding that you had to submit your product to a third party for testing, and that third party was vetted. Then there is the low grade corruption endemic in construction in the UK. The fact that large councils have Quantity surveyors on a percentage fee, rather than a fixed fee, is a big problem.

jollofricepeas 6y ago

Greed and hubris is good. This story reminds me a lot of the recent documentary, Challenger: Final Flight produced by JJ Abrams on Netflix. “There’s pressures of budget, there’s pressures of schedule,” he said. “And then there’s all these people, these men and women down the chain, who get stuck and saddled with the results of those decisions.” I can’t help but see a pattern here. - Big Tobacco - US opioid crisis - Challenger disaster - Grenfell - Nazi Germany To paraphrase Baldwin: “Tragedy is not caused by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”

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PaulHoule 6y ago
I'll point out the space shuttle disasters as being particularly misunderstood. The real mistake happened around 1976 when they settled on the basic design which they estimated had a 2-3% chance of blowing up on any launch. Every other manned space vehicle has had an emergency escape for the crew. An emergency escape system could have saved the lives of the Challenger crew because they survived the external tank explosion (were killed when the crew compartment hit the ocean) -- they thought about putting one in, but then they wouldn't have had space in the hatchback for a satellite. The thermal tiles were also "unsafe at any speed", it was known at the beginning that the tiles would get broken or fall off sometime and there was a lot of nail-biting around the first flights, but after "it" didn't happen a few times people started to relax. Sociologist Dianne Vaughn popularized the term "Normalization of Deviance" in connection with the Challenger Disaster but it has been greatly misunderstood with the public. Today people think it is the doctor not washing his hands and not being confronted by the nurse about it, but in the case of NASA it is a formal process where they make a list of 200 unacceptable situations about the space shuttle that they make the case they can squeak by one by one and each speaker has a few minutes to make a case and if they had bad slides and didn't make a good point they would clear the floor for the next "catastrophe". "Normalization of Deviance" is a regular procedure with dangerous technology -- it's the paperwork that they fill out because they put the door frame in the wrong way in the break room at the nuclear powerplant or when they fly a regional jet back from a regional airport with one angle-of-attack sensor down because it can be fixed much more easily at the big airport.

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lopmotr 6y ago

It's funny to think "obviously polyethylene is flammable, how did nobody notice" then realize my own house has expanded polystyrene and polyester fiber batts insulation under the floor. I wondered about fire risk but saw some vague claims by the manufacturers and that the local authority approved them, and just trusted that, despite these local authorities having a history of approving bad products. Decades ago, my dad was very critical of all polymer building insulation because of the fire danger. I thought he was just out of touch and obviously it wouldn't be allowed if it wasn't safe. This isn't the olden days! We're more strictly regulated now!

PaulHoule 6y ago
In the case of skyscrapers it breaks the basic safety concept. Fires won't propagate up or down a properly built skyscraper except by the flames lapping up from floor 14 starting a fire on a floor 15.
tialaramex 6y ago
Your home is presumably only 2-4 stories. So in the event of a bad fire you just evacuate. Probably the fire can be extinguished, but maybe it can't, either way you aren't inside, your insurer is on the hook for any increase in costs from products that did not perform. Maybe "the invisible hand" will fix that, maybe it won't, but nobody dies. In a high rise residential building it's a nightmare to evacuate, so until that becomes necessary (as it did at Grenfell and one of the other phases looked at whether emergency services were wrong to delay so long and why that happened) the preference is to compartmentalize as you would on a ship (can't evacuate those either). As a result of this approach to fire fighting it's critical that fire cannot spread between compartments. Flat #1 is on fire, a team comes out, they fight the fire, maybe Flat #1 is completely ruined, but the people in Flat #2 are just annoyed by the smell of smoke and the debris, they aren't actually in danger. At Grenfell this cladding meant the fire was able to spread outside the building defeating compartmentalization, in hindsight once that happened it would be impossible to contain it. So the height of the building isn't just why this is news, it's also why it was a problem.
PaulHoule 6y ago
According to Civil Defense documents, construction post-1945 was considered to be more vulnerable to the thermal and shock effects of nuclear weapons than pre-1945 construction. Plastic materials were a villain. A black polyurethane couch could catch the rays of a H-Bomb fireball 100 kilometers array and within 15 seconds create a fireball in the room. Details like that create a lot of uncertainty about causalities. Closer to home your Fire Marshall could demonstrate for you why you should not smoke in bed or what happens to a car when you light the passenger seat with a Zippo. Common natural materials have safety properties against fire. For instance, if I got too close to a fire, a wool sweater would form a char, "ablating" like the Apollo spacecraft heat shield. An acrylic sweater would melt and probably transfer more heat to my skin and make it more likely that I get burned, if it doesn't ignite itself.

PaulHoule 6y ago

I think it's funny that the "Spectator" was a conservative newspaper long before we had a Republican party in America... And they run articles like this!

lopmotr 6y ago
Huh? Because conservatives don't like safety? Or they like dishonest business practices?
- earhart 6y ago
  American conservatives tend to support freedom of contract and freedom of speech (including dishonest/incomplete speech) - and they consider monetary donations to politicians to be speech. They also tend to believe in supply-side economics (failures are met with “Well, you didn’t cut taxes on the rich enough!”), and the myth of the entrepreneur who singlehandedly builds a business empire (ignoring the myriad ways government supports these activities). So... yes, American conservatives tend to dislike safety (people should be responsible for their own safety, regulation will slow down business and make everyone worse off), and they tend to support dishonest business practices (let the market handle punishment, it’s not the government’s job to decide what truth is and to make sure people are honest).
  - whatthesmack 6y ago
    I get the sense that you're applying your feelings to a group you don't like. As a conservative, I can say that I am interested in safety as much as anyone. I certainly don't want to become a victim of an avoidable incident, and I don't want anyone else to become a victim either. > American conservatives tend to dislike safety (people should be responsible for their own safety, regulation will slow down business and make everyone worse off) People being responsible for their own well-being certainly doesn't imply a dislike of safety. It's acknowledging a reality that ultimately we are responsible for our own fates. And it certainly doesn't rubber-stamp fraud, as is the case here where companies literally lied about the leveling of their product. In addition, it does not allow the government to shirk responsibility for requiring the use of the dangerous product in this case. > it’s not the government’s job to decide what truth is Allowing governments free reign to determine truth has historically led to immense suffering and hundreds of millions of documented deaths.

0xcde4c3db 6y ago

I suppose the $64,000 question is this: how many other Grenfell Towers are out there, and how can they be identified? The scope would probably be pretty clear if it were just a matter of one negligent construction company, but it seems like this is a problem that spans the whole chain of approving, selecting, selling, and installing this product category.

samizdis 6y ago
A news report from June of this year suggests a figure of 2,000 other UK buildings affected: https://metro.co.uk/2020/06/12/2000-buildings-still-have-grenfell-cladding-despite-promise-remove-month-12843420/ https://metro.co.uk/2020/06/12/2000-buildings-still-have-gre... Edited to add: The UK government publishes "ACM [aluminium composite material] remediation data" every month. This is "being collected to help the Building Safety Programme make buildings safe and to make people feel safe from the risk of fire, now and in the future". https://www.gov.uk/guidance/aluminium-composite-material-cladding#acm-remediation-data https://www.gov.uk/guidance/aluminium-composite-material-cla...
DanBC 6y ago
They are being identified. It's causing problems for some home-owners. https://bylinetimes.com/2020/08/28/the-cladding-trap-thousands-fearful-in-the-shadow-of-grenfell/ https://bylinetimes.com/2020/08/28/the-cladding-trap-thousan...
walshemj 6y ago
Lots in my local town there was a new development where a lot of flats and a new hotel have had to have cladding replaced.
xxpor 6y ago
Anyone know the status of the legality of similar cladding and insulation in the US?
postingawayonhn 6y ago
I haven't been following what's happening in the UK but here in the Australian state of Victoria (we had a couple of cladding fires too) the government established an organisation called Cladding Safety Victoria. They're identifying all buildings with this sort of cladding and coordinating replacement. They just started on my apartment building this week (there's only a small section around the main entry).

tomp 6y ago

key quotes: > Arconic realised its polyethylene-cored cladding had a horrendous reaction to fire following French tests in 2005, where it burned fiercely and obtained a basement ranking of Class E. Despite this, Arconic continued to market it as the much safer Class B > The Irish company Kingspan’s insulation passed one of these tests, which took place on a fake wall made with non-combustible cement. This test pass permitted its use on tall buildings, but only in an exact replica of the system tested. Despite this, the firm marketed its insulation as ‘suitable for use on high-rise buildings’. [...] After the test was passed in 2005, Kingspan altered the chemical composition of the insulation so that it was no longer the same product > Celotex, a smaller firm [...] its insulation had also passed a test, also using a non-combustible cladding panel, and it too began to market its product as safe for use on high rises. But the test was not as it seemed: fire resisting boards were used around the temperature monitors that record the pass or fail, distorting the result. > the Local Authority Building Control [...] appears to have written its certificate simply by copy and pasting an email written by Celotex's Jon Roper, even including the same typo on the certificate. So, among Arconic, Kingspan, Celotex, LABC (or Spectator, if they're pulling a Bloomberg) - I wonder if anyone is going to jail...

mellosouls 6y ago
I can't read the article to see if it's mentioned but a reminder that Arconic employees have refused to give evidence: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54792111 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54792111
- asplake 6y ago
  I wonder if in the long run that will make them easier to prosecute &/or sue. Certainly hope so
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    In the US, refusing to give evidence (taking the fifth) can be used against you in a civil suit, but it cannot be used against you criminally. If you’re facing civil and criminal liability at the same time, this puts you in a tough situation, since protecting yourself from criminal liability might increase your civil exposure. I believe in the UK refusing to give evidence might be worse, both because they have a whole different model of courts (inquisitive vs. adversarial), and because the underpinnings of US legal rights stem from a perceived short coming of the British court system.

joefife 6y ago

Private Eye has been talking about this for over a year. The Page 94 podcast gives a very good account.

phronesis 6y ago
Absolutely. Like so many things, Private Eye is ahead of the curve in its reporting. Another podcast worth a mention is James O'Brien's recent Full Disclosure interview with Grenfell survivor Edward Daffern. Horrifying to hear how the residents were treated before, during and after the tragedy, and how predictable the whole thing was.
- cameronh90 6y ago
  Worth remembering Private Eye are biased towards insinuating institutional corruption, leading to their support of Wakefield against the pharmas in the MMR scandal. They are generally good, but they aren't immune from bias and it still pays to be critical.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    Institutional corruption is such a powerful threat to humans that it pays to be suspicious.

erentz 6y ago

I’m dealing with my own fire safety related conflict at the moment. Maybe I am the asshole in the story but my building recently announced its annual fire inspection to all residents of the ~350 apartments, by email, the day before it was to happen. They said there was no choice. They provided no information about the pandemic response plan of the contractor or the infection control measures they would be taking. Since both myself and my wife are quite serious immunocompromised I objected. I told them I couldn’t let them in with all this lacking and instead to call me when they reached my apartment and we could do it via phone or video call or I could separately take videos of what they need. Now I’ve seen these guys when they do this work before (having lived here for a number of years) and they just open the door step in and then slam it behind them. They don’t knock and wait. It’s absurd. I stuck a notice on my door telling them to call or video call first when arriving. They didn’t enter but didn’t call. Fast forward a week. They’re now giving me notice they’ll come in against my objection. They won’t answer any questions about the pandemic response plan or what vetting they did of their contractor and it seems the contractor doesn’t have one (or it’s embarrassingly bad). They said for PPE they use cloth masks, which are quite inadequate for protecting us. They said they take their temperatures but as the UK’s Chochrane review showed that is next to useless in screening infected people. I provided thorough videos of me testing every alarm in the apartment and showing every sprinkler head in detail. I captured a video of the building alarms sounding in every room on the day of the inspection. They will not view these and tell me what is inadequate about them. They simply say they must do a physical inspection but won’t tell me who says or what regulation says it must be physical. Now by my very napkin math these inspectors - if they’re doing inspections like this day in day out - could comfortably enter up to a thousand homes in a week. In the middle of the worst peak yet in this pandemic. Without proper protection for both protecting themselves and if they are infected from protecting the occupants. And without any testing regime in place to catch them early if they are sick. No plan in place to notify buildings or residents they have visited if an employee does get sick. None of that. They don’t even ask the residents if they have any symptoms or are sick before barging in. It seems like a high risk job and a poorly controlled vector of transmission. Entirely because the corporate landlord is lazy and doesn’t care. And the fire inspection contractor company is lazy and doesn’t care. And they can all get away with being lazy and not caring.

6y ago

bjornsing 6y ago

”Celotex even inquired about using the [Grenfell] tower as a case study for the suitability of its product for high rises. So it has turned out, although not in the way the company hoped.” To say the least... :(

chiph 6y ago

The American Society of Civil Engineers had a presentation from Dr. Angus Law, a UK lecturer in fire safety engineering. There are lots of engineering details covered about why it spread so quickly (approx. 30 minutes from a single room fire on the 3rd floor to reaching the top of the building) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N6eeNjbVws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N6eeNjbVws

ppod 6y ago

Might be reading too much into this, but I think there are a few layers going on here politically. Grenfell has been held up as an example of the failure and incompetence of successive Conservative governments. The Spectator and The Times are both publications that would be seen as centre-right and more Tory-friendly than most, and they both have stories today very pointedly (and totally correctly) blaming the Irish company Kingspan and this French company. Things are especially tense between the French, the Irish, and the British (especially the Conservatives) because of the Brexit crunch talks. They are completely right to point at these companies, and the Irish media has totally failed on this story: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/construction/the-irish-times-business-person-of-the-month-gene-murtagh-1.4369658 https://www.irishtimes.com/business/construction/the-irish-t... But I think there is an underlying reason why the national adjectives are sprinkled all through these articles.

dopylitty 6y ago

It's important to realize even if there was specific malfeasance in the companies involved in this particular event the problems are systemic. We are part of an economic system that values profits for a small number of people above safety or quality. While it's important to punish those who behave unethically a better response would be to change the system so that ethical behavior and the pursuits of safety and quality are valued above the pursuit of wealth.

ReactiveJelly 6y ago
I'll take the bait: How do you propose we do that, if all currently known systems of government are insufficient?
- shmageggy 6y ago
  Not OP, but I don’t read it as bait, and I don’t think having a solution in mind is a prerequisite for noting a problem. As for your question, ideas like UBI, post-growth capitalism, etc seem to move towards relaxing the ethics vs profit dilemmas that systematically drive these disasters (as well as most of the other slow-motion disasters like climate change, biodiversity loss, etc).
- acdha 6y ago
  You’re just repeating Tyler Cowen’s libertarian fallacy of assuming the quality of government is constant. A far more interesting question would be testing that belief, which could then lead to you learning which countries do better and why.
- dash2 6y ago
  Perhaps rather than focusing on very broad systems of government, we could look at changing the system of fire regulation and inspection. There's ground in between "blame individuals" and "blame capitalism".
Camas 6y ago
Fire related deaths have been falling for decades in the UK so that system must be working.

ourcat 6y ago

An additional scandal is the extortionate costs for buildings over a certain height in obtaining an EWS1 Form to show to mortgage lenders. Without which, your appartment is effectively valued at zero, since you'll never be able to sell it.

easytiger 6y ago
Yea. The difficulty related to the fact the companies verifying the buildings had understandable difficulty finding insurers to underwrite their opinion. There are plenty of other scandals with which I am familiar where buildings have had huge amounts of completely unjustified work done under bad advice
jessaustin 6y ago
After reading TFA and this comment thread, that doesn't seem scandalous at all. It would be evil for lenders to underwrite deathtraps.
- ourcat 6y ago
  The scandal is that they shouldn't have been allowed to be built with the 'wrong' insulation in the first place. Also, people who have had surveys for properties they bought some years ago (pre-Grenfell) as in my case. So, if the Government are going enforce new standards and impose the need for very costly surveys and 'forms' to show new safety standards (again, based on their own ineptitude that caused Grenfell), then they should be the ones who have to pay for any remediation. Not the Leasholders.

bigbubba 6y ago

Does the government still recommend that people in highrises shelter in place when there is a fire in another apartment in the building? They did before, after this fire I found the cutesy animated videos they published explaining how you should shelter in place because fire is unlikely to spread in a highrise. It seems like bullshit to me. At the first hint of fire in a building, I'll be flying down the nearest staircase that doesn't have smoke coming out of it. I'd not sit around in a burning building waiting to see if the fire gets worse, only to find out I no longer have any options for escape.

ericbarrett 6y ago
It’s not clear to me that this is bad advice if safety regulations were followed during construction. Like the 737 MAX, however, rampant unpunished corporate malfeasance has negated it.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  It seems to me that if the high-rise building truly resists the spread of fire, then sheltering in place is probably the optimal solution. However I just can't trust my own life to that. Furthermore one of the hazards used to justify this advice was the possibility that hallways or stairs are already filled with smoke. Well if that's the case, doesn't that perhaps call into question the premise that fires stay contained in these buildings? I found a local copy of the video, it was from the London Fire Brigade and links to the site knowtheplan.co.uk which is now defunct. I can't find the video still on the net, but it might be out there somewhere. Edit: found it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Vy4L8B7KI9k https://youtube.com/watch?v=Vy4L8B7KI9k
  - ericbarrett 6y ago
    Only familiar with US building codes but stairway shafts in taller buildings are supposed to be built from thicker concrete, with fire-rated doors, so theoretically they should remain usable for some time (minutes) even if the floors they pass are engulfed. For larger buildings there must be two or more stairway shafts in case one is compromised. All is negated if doors are propped open, locks defeated, structure altered, building is wrapped in solidified napalm cladding, etc. So I’m with you, I’d also GTFO.

maxehmookau 6y ago

I'm not sure any of this is a surprise. It is surprising to see The Spectator call it out though!

ggcdn 6y ago

> An unforgivably naive market of architects and contractors then began merrily specifying it for a wide range of uses well beyond its original test. Architects are architects, Contractors are contractors, and neither are fire engineers. No one can be an expert on everything. This is why we have building codes, product certification, and engineering assurance process. The problem here appeared to be dishonest players. If certified independent labs were required to test products, and licensed engineers were required to approve the assembly and submit their letters of insurance for the permit, it seems like there would be a net benefit to the public (this is how it works in Canada). If there was a stronger regulatory system, the investigators would be able to look up the letters of assurance for this permit, obtain the project documentation from the responsible engineer, investigate and possible charge him with negligence if he failed to spec a certified fire assembly. It appears that in the UK, there is no clear hierarchy of responsibility. When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. As an aside, Fire rating generally involves more than just a single product - it requires an 'assembly'. That assembly must be recreated every time the product is used to achieve the fire rating. If the testing assembly required 1/2" non-combustible cement backing board, the installation also requires it. It sounds like the fire rated assemblies were not being followed in this case.

michaelt 6y ago
> It sounds like the fire rated assemblies were not being followed in this case. The fraud by Celotex and Kingspan is more literal, in this case. The only assemblies that managed to pass the large scale fire test cheated by using a bunch of nonstandard parts, materials that weren't available on the market, and even put kiln insulation material blocking the temperature sensors on the test rig. They then truncated any test reports sent to customers, omitting mention of the cheats. It was literally impossible for any customer to build the assembly that had passed fire testing, as they were never told about the cheats. They then took the reports from these cheated "third party tests" and converted them into certificates from further authorities. And their manufacturers' marketing departments "misunderstood" the test reports and put out marketing material claiming the material was of limited combustibility - which it was not.

mcguire 6y ago

"This chiefly means three products: the actual cladding panels (thin aluminium sheets bonded to a core of polyethylene, a plastic with similar properties to solid petrol) and two forms of combustible foam insulation which were fitted behind it." Cough, cough, cough. Does anyone know the state of liability laws in Britain? Here in the states, the companies involved would be going down in a hail of lawsuits and the industry would be scrambling to distance itself. I wonder what the software development industry would look like under that kind of investigation.

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james1071 6y ago
Not a lawyer - think the main issue will be whether the companies are shown to have manipulated safety testing. If not, then it will be a case of bad rules allowing a bad product to have been used.
remus 6y ago
> ...the companies involved would be going down in a hail of lawsuits and the industry would be scrambling to distance itself. I think this is essentially what will happen here. One of the problems is that the remediation work to correct the dangerous cladding runs in to billions of pounds and is a bill none of the individual companies involved can afford, so working out exactly who to sue (with everyone denying liability, of course) is kinda tricky.
willyt 6y ago
I’m not a legal expert but here’s my understanding of the process: If a person or group of people take civil action, liability will be determined in the specialist construction courts, typically in construction cases many entities are held jointly liable, so the liability could be shared between the client, architect, fire testing laboratories, fire engineers, contractors and the fire brigade. The court will determine the total damages to be paid. There is a generally agreed amount for loss of life, everything thing else is determined based on the actual cost e.g things like electric wheelchairs for life, temporary accommodation costs, the rebuilding costs etc. Unlike the US, there are no punitive damages in the UK the liability is purely the cost of putting things right. The plaintiff’s lawyers have to be careful not to ask for unreasonable damages as this can negatively affect their case. The court will then apportion the liability to each party. As you can imagine, these cases go into a lot of detail and take years to resolve.

quattrofan 6y ago

Manslaughter charges for the execs should follow.

scraft 6y ago

I and a huge amount of other people are living in a flat which currently has a value of £0 and am currently waiting to find out how much remediation works are going to cost to make the building I live in safe. As it is deemed unsafe by retrospective government fire and safety requirements, it is impossible to get a new mortgage for and therefore impossible to sell. The remediation costs are likely to be in the 10's of thousands of pounds. The building may have been built to meet the requirements at the time (12 years ago) and then again it may not have. The guidelines have also obviously changed since Grenfell. But as it stands right now, all costs are to be passed onto the leaseholder i.e. the person who owns and lives in the flat i.e me. I moved in one year ago, had all the survey's done, used a solicitor and followed all procedure. Other people are in even worse positions, if they can't afford a bill of £50,000 their only option maybe bankruptcy, if they are in various legal professions or an accountant this means automatically losing their license to practice. Other people who have used the governments partial ownership scheme, where you buy 25% of a property and then rent (paying 25% less rent per month) are being asked to pay 100% of the remediation costs. For a lot of people the costs are more than the 25% stake in the property they own. Some property developers followed the guidelines at the time so say it isn't their fault. The government says it followed the standards at the time so it isn't their fault. The building inspectors which failed to properly inspect properties (when there were actual issues outside of what has been changed retrospectively) seem to have immunity against legal action. The cladding companies who made unsafe cladding are trying to weasel their way out of responsibility by saying it is safe in the right circumstances. It feels like there are a few slices of blame to dish out. But one party who has had NO involvement in any of this is the people living in the flats. The most sensible option I have heard suggested so far is that the government pays to clean up this entire scandal, and then puts a levy on property developers making flats so they get a percentage back on each new development to slowly recoup the money. But instead of that, the government is making various noises about wanting to protect leaseholders whilst simultaneously not doing anything concrete, even though as I write this people are already filing bankruptcy, giving up their flat which has all the money they have ever saved in, and on top of that, the remediation work in subject to VAT so the government brings in tax for all work done to fix up this mess. You can track huge sums (millions of pounds) being donated/pumped into the conservative party by property developers, and of course members of the conservative party also have shares or other stakes in property development companies. It is a scandal of the highest order.

AlexMoffat 6y ago

At least none of the top level comments are claiming the invisible hand would solve this if only there were fewer regulations. Better enforcement and more regulations seem from experience to be the only way.

rienbdj 6y ago

RBKC are a really nasty bunch. Just recently they removed a cycle lane from their high street (only one in their borough) after complaints for a few right wing celebrities.

leashless 6y ago

I live in an affected building. AMA.

leashless 6y ago

I live in an affected building in London. AMA.

naringas 6y ago

rich wealthy country corruption: the building gets built and (if)when disaster strikes, the corruption is revealed by broken safety regulations. 3rd world country corruption: the project gets started, maybe they put the first stone in a ceremony. nothing gets built and years later there's an empty lot sitting there.

wooger 6y ago
The first case certainly also happens in China and numerous poorer countries. Not just breaking safety regulations, but by literally swapping out concrete in structural support pillars for old oil cans. Or just using a poor concrete mix for everything in the first place.

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