Weekend Update 25/06/17 Murder - The Grenfell Tower Fire. Update-Avoidable.

Mr. Adam, 44, 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,” Mr. Adam said in an interview the next day, “they lost their lives.”

This Sunday, the New York Times covers the growing scandal of the needless Grenfell Tower murders. Despite a cladding fire in Irvine scotland in 1999, Blair's Labour party still clad buildings in flamable insulation and cladding, as sop to "green" environment voters and pandering to the media fad of the day. But they chose fatally  to do it on the cheap. Public housing Tower block residents tend to vote Labour. Their votes could be taken for granted. Who cares what they think. More will be added later.

Why Grenfell Tower Burned: Regulators Put Cost Before Safety

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, DANNY HAKIM and JAMES GLANZ

June 24, 2017

LONDON — The doorbell woke Yassin Adam just before 1 a.m. A neighbor was frantically alerting others on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower about a fire in his apartment. “My fridge blew up,” the man shouted.

Residents of Grenfell Tower had complained for years that the 24-story public housing block invited catastrophe. It lacked fire alarms, sprinklers and a fire escape. It had only a single staircase. And there were concerns about a new aluminum facade that was supposed to improve the building — but was now whisking the flames skyward.

The facade, Mr. Adam said, “burned like a fire that you pour petrol on.”

The incineration of Grenfell Tower on June 14, the deadliest fire in Britain in more than a century, is now a national tragedy. The London police on Friday blamed flammable materials used in the facade for the spread of the blaze and said the investigation could bring charges of manslaughter. Hundreds of families were evacuated from five high-rises that posed similar risks.

Flames consumed the tower so quickly that arriving firefighters wondered if they could even get inside. People trapped on the higher floors screamed for their lives through broken windows. At least 79 people died, a toll that is expected to rise as more bodies are recovered. Survivors have charged that the facade was installed to beautify their housing project for the benefit of wealthy neighbors.

A formal government inquiry into the fire has just begun. But interviews with tenants, industry executives and fire safety engineers point to a gross failure of government oversight, a refusal to heed warnings from inside Britain and around the world and a drive by successive governments from both major political parties to free businesses from the burden of safety regulations.

Promising to cut “red tape,” business-friendly politicians evidently judged that cost concerns outweighed the risks of allowing flammable materials to be used in facades. Builders in Britain were allowed to wrap residential apartment towers — perhaps several hundred of them — from top to bottom in highly flammable materials, a practice forbidden in the United States and many European countries. And companies did not hesitate to supply the British market.

 

The facade, installed last year at Grenfell Tower, in panels known as cladding and sold as Reynobond PE, consisted of two sheets of aluminum that sandwich a combustible core of polyethylene. It was produced by the American manufacturing giant Alcoa, which was renamed Arconic after a reorganization last year.

Arconic has marketed the flammable facades in Britain for years, even as it has adjusted its pitch elsewhere. In other European countries, Arconic’s sales materials explicitly instructed that “as soon as the building is higher than the firefighters’ ladders, it has to be conceived with an incombustible material.” An Arconic website for British customers said only that such use “depends on local building codes.”

For years, members of Parliament had written letters requesting new restrictions on cladding, especially as the same flammable facades were blamed for fires in Britain, France, the United Arab Emirates, Australia and elsewhere. Yet British authorities resisted new rules. A top building regulator explained to a coroner in 2013 that requiring only noncombustible exteriors in residential towers “limits your choice of materials quite significantly.”

Fire safety experts said the blaze at Grenfell Tower was a catastrophe that could have been avoided, if warnings had been heeded.

“How could that happen in our country at this time?” asked Dennis Davis, a former firefighter who is vice chairman of the nonprofit Fire Sector Federation.

Mr. Adam, 44, 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,” Mr. Adam said in an interview the next day, “they lost their lives.”

The first call to the London Fire Brigade came at 12:45 a.m., according to an official statement. Six minutes later, as the first firefighters reached the scene, brigade veterans struggled to fathom the speed of the blaze.

“That is not a real block with people in it!” one firefighter exclaimed, his astonishment captured in a video that later was shown on the BBC and Sky News and was shot inside his vehicle as it sped toward the building.

Other firefighters in the vehicle were heard gasping in horror.

“There are kids in there,” one said.

“How is that possible?”

“It has jumped all the way along the flats — look!”

How “are we going to get into that?” another asked, using an expletive.

Flames in an ordinary fire burst out of windows, moving from the inside out. Grenfell Tower burned in reverse, moving inward from the building’s exterior. The flames quickly tore upward in streaks through the facade, filling apartments with toxic black smoke. Torrents of orange and red branched out of the first streaks and shot upward. The flames encased the building in a cylinder of fire.

----The building they entered was built in 1974 in an architectural style known as Brutalism, and the original concrete structure, built without cladding, was designed to contain a fire in one apartment long enough for firefighters to prevent it from spreading very far. But the building’s floor plan gives a picture of what happened. Refrigerators in most apartments appear to have been positioned against an exterior wall, next to a window and just a few inches from the cladding installed in the renovation.

When the refrigerator on the fourth floor burst into flames, the fire ignited the flammable cladding and shot up the side of the building. The London police confirmed that on Friday and identified the refrigerator brand as Hotpoint. But experts who saw footage of the blaze had known the culprit at once. “You can tell immediately it’s the cladding,” said Glenn Corbett, an associate professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

The first well-known use of aluminum cladding on a high-rise was on the Alcoa Building, in Pittsburgh, erected as the manufacturer’s headquarters. Makers of cladding promoted it as both aesthetically striking and energy-efficient, because the aluminum surface reflects back heat and light. Demand for cladding surged with rising fuel costs and concerns about global warming, and over time, producers began selling it in a thin “sandwich” design: Two sheets of aluminum around a core made of flammable plastics like polyethylene.

The cladding is typically paired with a much thicker layer of foam insulation against the building’s exterior wall, as was the case at Grenfell Tower. Then the cladding may be affixed to the wall with metal studs, leaving a narrow gap between the cladding and the insulation.

But by 1998, regulators in the United States — where deaths from fires are historically more common than in Britain or Western Europe — began requiring real-world simulations to test any materials to be used in buildings taller than a firefighter’s two-story ladder. “The U.S. codes say you have to test your assembly exactly the way you install it in a building,” said Robert Solomon, an engineer at the National Fire Protection Association, which is funded in part by insurance companies and drafts model codes followed in the United States and around the world.

No aluminum cladding made with pure polyethylene — the type used at Grenfell Tower — has ever passed the test, experts in the United States say. The aluminum sandwiching always failed in the heat of a fire, exposing the flammable filling. And the air gap between the cladding and the insulation could act as a chimney, intensifying the fire and sucking flames up the side of a building. Attempts to install nonflammable barriers at vertical and horizontal intervals were ineffective in practice.

As a result, American building codes have effectively banned flammable cladding in high-rises for nearly two decades. The codes also require many additional safeguards, especially in new buildings or major renovations: automatic sprinkler systems, fire alarms, loudspeakers to provide emergency instructions, pressurized stairways designed to keep smoke out and multiple stairways or fire escapes.

And partly because of the influence of American architects, many territories around the world follow the American example. But not Britain.

---- With fire prevention in Britain, “you put all your eggs in one basket,” said Edwin Galea, director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich. And for decades, this was fairly effective. Britain has long reported far fewer deaths from fires relative to population than the United States, and typically, fewer than 350 residents die each year in fires (compared with more than 3,000 in the United States).

But as early as 1999, after a fire in Irvine, Scotland, British fire safety engineers warned Parliament that the advent of flammable cladding had opened a dangerous loophole in the regulations. The Irvine fire saw flames leap up panels at Garnock Court, a 14-story public housing block. One resident died, four others were injured and a parliamentary committee investigated the causes.

More

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/world/europe/grenfell-tower-london-fire.html

The missing three hours of the Grenfell Tower fire and the deathtrap stairwell

June 25 2017, 12:01am, The Sunday Times

While the cladding on Grenfell Tower helped spread the flames, shocking new evidence reveals the stairwell was a deathtrap, sucking in thick smoke and toxic gases, which sealed the fate of many residents

----A Sunday Times investigation has established that the narrow stairwell serving as the building’s only fire escape proved a significant obstacle to saving lives. Extensive testimony from survivors, rescuers and other witnesses suggest that the one part of the building supposed to provide a haven from smoke instead assisted its spread. The stairwell’s design, construction and subsequent maintenance — or lack of it — appear certain to be scrutinised by the forthcoming public inquiry.

Our investigation has confirmed that smoke poured into the stairwell on many floors, fanned by a so-called “stack” effect that forms strong currents of air, both upward and downward, in chimney-like internal spaces such as stairwells and lift shafts.

Fire safety experts are also examining what is known as the Coanda effect, whereby hot gases emitted in fires tend to be attracted to nearby surfaces, travelling rapidly across building facades once they escape from the source of the flames.

The Grenfell stairwell should have provided a safe passage away from danger; instead, as toxic draughts swirled through the building, it turned into a vertical tunnel of smoke. Heavily laden firemen trying to reach higher floors and residents desperate to flee downstairs were left groping around in a poisonous darkness amid harrowing scenes of desperation and panic.

More

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/grenfell-tower-fire-the-missing-three-hours-stairwell-danger-council-lqh9nc55q

26 June 2017 Updated 26/6/2017

Grenfell Tower blaze looks to have been completely avoidable

By Plastics News Europe

Almost two weeks after the disastrous fire that killed at least 79 and virtually destroyed Grenfell Tower, a high-rise block of public housing flats in North Kensington, west London, facts are emerging that suggest that this was an accident that was “preventable” following “years of neglect”, in the words of London mayor Sadiq Khan.

On 23 June 2017, Metropolitan Detective Superintendent Fiona McCormack announced that the police had expert evidence showing the fire was not deliberate and that it had started in a faulty Whirlpool Hotpoint fridge-freezer.

However, the fact that the fire was able to spread so quickly from a single flat to the entire building, instead of being contained, is almost certainly due to the external cladding and insulation that had been installed on the building as part of a refurbishment project in 2015-2016.

As part of the project, the concrete structure was fitted with new windows and new aluminium composite rainscreen cladding.  Two types were used: Reynobond, which consists of two aluminium sheets with a polyethylene core sandwiched in between, and is produced by Arconic; and Reynolux prepainted aluminium sheet, also from Arconic. Polyethylene, it should be noted, is a thermoplastic material, which melts and drips as it burns, spreading the fire downwards as well as upwards.

Beneath these sheets, and fixed to the outside of the walls of the flat was Celotex RS5000 PIR thermal insulation, from Celotex, a Saint-Gobain company. While the material has a “class 0” fire rating, it is ultimately combustible according to the Building Research Establishment during which deadly hydrogen cyanide fumes can be produced.

In its report, Fire performance of external thermal insulation for walls of multi-storey buildings (2013), the Building Research Establishment describes how such a cladding system can cause fire to spread: “The mechanisms by which fire can spread externally include combustible materials and cavities – either as part of a system, or those created by delamination of the system or material loss during the fire.  Once flames enter a cavity they have the potential to travel significant distances, giving rise to the risk of unseen fire spread within the cladding systems.”

It adds: “flames become confined or restricted by entering cavities within the external cladding system, they will become elongated as they seek oxygen and fuel to support the combustion process.  This process can lead to flame extension of five to ten times that of the original flame lengths, regardless of the materials used to line the cavities.”

More

http://www.plasticsnewseurope.com/article/20170626/PNE/170629933/grenfell-tower-blaze-looks-to-have-been-completely-avoidable