London Fire and Aftermath RIP

GM228

News emerging of a 8-12 month old baby found today alive on the 16th floor. Hard to believe that is possible.

Stheno

GM228 wrote: »

News emerging of a 8-12 month old baby found today alive on the 16th floor. Hard to believe that is possible.

Link?

GM228

Stheno wrote: »

Link?

http://metro-uk.com/baby-rescued-12-days-after-londons-grenfell-tower-fire/

Not on main stream news yet so do hope it's true, Grenfell could do with a good news miracle story.

silverharp

GM228 wrote: »

http://metro-uk.com/baby-rescued-12-days-after-londons-grenfell-tower-fire/

Not on main stream news yet so do hope it's true, Grenfell could do with a good news miracle story.

I'd say fake, probably a fake site, babies cant survive that long without water

Fake news.

tara73

GM228 wrote: »

http://metro-uk.com/baby-rescued-12-days-after-londons-grenfell-tower-fire/

Not on main stream news yet so do hope it's true, Grenfell could do with a good news miracle story.

http://www.trendolizer.com/2017/06/baby-rescued-from-burnt-building-12-days-after-londons-grenfell-tower-fire.html

I think this is a fake story to get clicks and therefore making money from advertisers.

Absolutely disgusting.

Fratton Fred

GM228 wrote: »

http://metro-uk.com/baby-rescued-12-days-after-londons-grenfell-tower-fire/

Not on main stream news yet so do hope it's true, Grenfell could do with a good news miracle story.

clasic click bait by the looks of it

GM228

If it's fake (which it does appear to be) then they are pure scum!

Kimbot

If its fake then did the police and mayor tweet saying the baby was found or not like the article mentions?

Yourself isit

Ulysses Gaze wrote: »

Did Labour not try that in the 1970's with Wilson and Callaghan and it ultimately crippled the UK, leading to the rise of Thatcher?

Labour and the Tories (and the republicans) were Keynesians during the post war period which was a time of rapid wage growth. Since then decline or stagnation

Samaris

jonnycivic wrote: »

If its fake then did the police and mayor tweet saying the baby was found or not like the article mentions?

It is fake - there's various news-stories now talking about it. It was a rather brutal hoax. Apparently whatever lowlife it was set up a site to spread it, using the Metro name and the BBC tagline.

http://metro.co.uk/2017/06/26/people-are-spreading-distressing-hoax-stories-about-a-baby-being-found-alive-in-grenfell-tower-6736320/

JupiterKid

I've read that there a dozens of tower blocks in the UK with similar highly flammable cladding to Grenfell. All that cladding will have to come down ASAP and the residents rehoused.

But I think there is a deeper issue here - and that is the general safety of tower blocks in the event of a fire. Why only one set of stairs? I think so many of these towers were thrown up hastily in the 60s and 70s with little or no real thought put into the safety of residents.

There was certainly little consideration of the well being of residents of towers, most of which have been shown to be bad environments in which to live and raise a family. They should never have been built in the first place.

Well designed, well built 3-5 storey dwellings can work much better than tower blocks and house people on a human scale rather than shoving them into high rise flats, to be conveniently forgotten about.

The problem with Corbusian fantasy high rise cities is that the human factor was forgotten about. High rise housing has its place, but only in the context of a diverse and broad range of housing provision.

tara73

JupiterKid wrote: »

But I think there is a deeper issue here - and that is the general safety of tower blocks in the event of a fire. Why only one set of stairs? I think so many of these towers were thrown up hastily in the 60s and 70s with little or no real thought put into the safety of residents.

There was certainly little consideration of the well being of residents of towers, most of which have been shown to be bad environments in which to live and raise a family. They should never have been built in the first place.

Well designed, well built 3-5 storey dwellings can work much better than tower blocks and house people on a human scale rather than shoving them into high rise flats, to be conveniently forgotten about.

this is very true. hence my thought in an earlier post whether it wouldn't be better to demolish this Towers because it's difficult, costs money and time to refurb/bring it up to todays fire standards. And if you start on these Towers, you'll end up finding more and more parts like pipes and interior fittings which ran it's course.

I think an outside safety staircase would bring a lot but don't think it'll make it safe enough regarding all other issues this Towers may have.

mikeybrennan

Discussion of a cover up on newsnight over numbers dead

David Lammy MP tweeted that dozens jumped.

Also says 40 huddled in a room

BillyBobBS

mikeybrennan wrote: »

Discussion of a cover up on newsnight over numbers dead

David Lammy MP tweeted that dozens jumped.

Also says 40 huddled in a room

Doesn't bear even thinking about. :eek: The poor souls

jackofalltrades

JupiterKid wrote: »

But I think there is a deeper issue here - and that is the general safety of tower blocks in the event of a fire. Why only one set of stairs? I think so many of these towers were thrown up hastily in the 60s and 70s with little or no real thought put into the safety of residents.

It's crazy the fact that although they weren't the best put together, the design from a fire safety point of view worked.
Contain the fire in one apartment and wait till the fire brigade put it out.
That plan would have worked if it wasn't for the cladding.
They seem to have taken 40 odd years of improvements in building design and fire safety and managed to re-design a building to make it significantly less safe.

Also fire safety inspections seem to have turned into somewhat of a sham.
From the Evening Standard.

He told MPs: "When the commissioners went into those tower blocks in Camden, in their own words, they found multiple fire safety inspection failures, failures which frankly should not have happened in tower blocks of any type, certainly those tower blocks in Camden.

"For example there were problems with gas pipe insulation, there were stairways that were not accessible, there were breaches of internal walls and most astonishingly there were hundreds, literally hundreds, of fire doors missing.

"The estimate by Camden Council itself is they need at least 1,000 fire doors because they were missing from those five blocks.

Samaris

There seems to have been an issue with pulling trained fire inspectors/advisers (the guys that actually come out from the fire brigade to advise on new planning) since about 2012. Their numbers were cut drastically and more power was given to the subcontractors to make the decisions, away from Elf and Safety and the leading architect.

Not to mention a political boast from a couple of years ago that the length of time taken to get through all the boring red tape of fire inspections had been cut from six hours to 30 minutes.

30. Minutes. For a tower block that size(?) You'd barely have gotten up to the top floor by then!

The more I hear about this whole awful situation, the more inevitable a horrific loss of life like Grenfell seems to have been.

LordSutch

1984 the prediction.

https://youtu.be/upViHb8z4wY

tara73

jackofalltrades wrote: »

It's crazy the fact that although they weren't the best put together, the design from a fire safety point of view worked.
Contain the fire in one apartment and wait till the fire brigade put it out. That plan would have worked if it wasn't for the cladding.
.

how do you know that for sure?

tara73

mikeybrennan wrote: »

Discussion of a cover up on newsnight over numbers dead

David Lammy MP tweeted that dozens jumped.

Also says 40 huddled in a room

why am I not surprised..

mikeybrennan

I can easily picture a scenario where a police chief is told to 'slow play ' the release of casualty figures

Peregrinus

mikeybrennan wrote: »

I can easily picture a scenario where a police chief is told to 'slow play ' the release of casualty figures

I'm as cynical as the next guy, but I'm sceptical of this one.

Every press officer knows the maxim that "the sooner, and in more detail, you release the bad news, the better". It's known in the trade as Kennedy's Chappaquiddick Theorem. (Younger readers may wish to Google "Chappaquiddick".)

There was absolutely no payoff or benefit to the authorities in drip-feeding news about casualties. The only result would be steadily climbing casualty figures, and a continued focus on casualties, at a time when public anger is growing and a hunt is on for someone to blame. Really, anybody who was to blame, or thought they might be, would be much better off having the casualty information release at a time when people were either still in shock, or were focussed in rallying round, expressing sympathy and practical support, and generally displaying the spirit of the blitz.

So, if casualty information came out slowly, the reason is very unlikely to have been to try to get favourable - or, at least, less unfavourable - news coverage. It was always going to have the opposite result.

The real explanation is more likely the one that has actually been offered. The scene inside the towers was absolutely horrifying. So catastrophic that actually counting the dead in a reliable way, and making even preliminary identifications, was going to be very difficult.

tara73

With a bit of thinking, I would agree, Peregrinus, I hope the responsible people are not that stupid releasing dead figures drip by drip. It would enact a massive uproar and the next scandal with the responsible people.

But there's the possibility that rescue teams just now are reaching areas in the Tower bit by bit. They said shortly after it happened that the Tower is not safe for the teams to do their work due to danger of collapsing. So could be they stabilised parts now and discovering what's there...just too bad to imagine.

jackofalltrades

tara73 wrote: »

how do you know that for sure?

Fair point, I can't be sure about it, but judging by previous fires and the way the fire brigade responded I'd say the fire being contained would have been a strong possibility.
It may have spread to surrounding flats through open windows, but then you're dealing with a slow moving fire.
And it's still at a height where hoses can stop the fire spreading any further externally.

orangerhyme

tara73 wrote: »

how do you know that for sure?

The fire brigade said that they had put out the fire and left the building and then only noticed the cladding on fire.

The whole event is complex and a perfect storm of conditions, but really without the cladding, none of this would have happened.

tara73

orangerhyme wrote: »

The fire brigade said that they had put out the fire and left the building and then only noticed the cladding on fire.

The whole event is complex and a perfect storm of conditions, but really without the cladding, none of this would have happened.

as you indicate, there are other severe lacking fire safety issues in this building. you contradict yourself here in saying, you know that it couldn't have happened another fire catastrophe without the cladding. Also, I find this a presumptuous attitude.

do you know the interior design with all materials by heart? I don't think so. They implemented the stay put rule, but who knows which material was chosen, what they did during refurbishment interiorwise (in all those years this Tower stands). For example the gas pipes obviously illegally fitted into the staircase and who knows where else would also have caused havoc with a fire in the staircase, without the cladding on fire.

so just be careful to claim to have the wisdom here about this building.

Samaris

The problem is that the cladding is what spread it, tara. The rest blocked escape from the flames, the smoke and the toxic fumes (the cladding when it burns apparently releases hydrogen cyanide - lovely!)

There appear to have been an awful lot of problems, but the major one in terms of how quickly the fire spread from one apartment to engulfing the building appears to have been the cladding. Internal layout wouldn't make much difference after that, bar in terms of smoke-movement. That does appear to have been an issue - the corridors and the stairwells filled with black, acrid smoke early on and that appears to have killed people trying to escape. The gas lines were another major issue (and I'm still struggling with who the hell thought that was a good idea), likely hindering escape down the main stairwell.

It is impossible to say that there might not have been a catastrophe of some sort without the cladding, but it is -unlikely- that the fire that started that night in Grenfell Tower would have claimed 79 lives. The fire brigade had caught and dealt with the fridge fire.

Fratton Fred

Germany is checking as well by the looks of things

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40420954

mikeybrennan

Fratton Fred wrote: »

Germany is checking as well by the looks of things

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40420954

Dubai and Qatar are said to have loads of it

they've got some huge towers

dilallio

Excellent article from the BBC on how UK building regulations can be manipulated to ensure a 'PASS'

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40418266