Environmental compliance-cost squeeze may have led building management to cut corners on safety.
JTN- The inquiry into the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in London has revealed how the styrofoam thermal insulation layer in newly-fitted wall cladding enabled a small domestic fire to rapidly engulf most of the building, resulting in the loss of 72 lives.
The type of cladding installed complied with advice given to local authorities in 2010 by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to reduce emissions through installing new boilers and insulation in apartment blocks.
At the time the U.K. was legally committed to an 80% cut in greenhouse gases from 1990 levels by 2050, and this has since been increased to 100%. To meet the already-extravagant target, huge sums of public money would be needed.
However, in 2012, then-finance minister George Osborne imposed strict borrowing limits on all councils across Britain — including the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where Grenfell Towers is situated — pressuring them to make savings where they could. more
just like those crappy silicone solar panels from China that only last from 5-7 years & that poisonous chinese gypsum board that ate all the wiring & polluted the air in a lot of houses built in Florida a few years back
… & the dog food from China w/ ethylene glycol in it & the sub-standard steel that Kali contracted for, to build their ‘inferiastructure’
hey, at least they died for a
good causeridiculous political ploy to commit the world to return to serfdomReminds me of that Great White concert tragedy. 🥺
Meh…the 72 are just collateral damage in the war on Global Warming!
https://youtu.be/qaOtliuDBtQ
Too soon?
Hey, hey, hey…..I don’t believe we are allowed to bad-mouth the fuck-ups that rule over us plebs while they line their pockets at the risk of hurting those they rule over….i.e. us plebs.
All to save the planet, doesn’t matter how many lives are lost. The global warming religion truly is a sickness.
We had this shit called chinese PIC (plastic insulated cable) in the counties that was awful. I don’t think it killed anybody, but it was woeful shit. You’d just open a ped and graze the conductors and most of the insulation would fall off. There were peds in The CRE that had 20% of the insulation existing.
Not only did it suck, but all the pairs were green/red to the terminal. You had to fuck with it to figure out where you were, and the more you fucked with it the more you degraded everybody’s shit.
I don’t know if it really was chinese shit, but that’s what we called it.
At least it was copper conductors.
The long-run multi-drop self-support shit we had in Baltimore was iron core. It would last a thousand years if installed correctly… but not fucking one I saw was correct.
That reminds me of Bridle Wire. Bridle wire was everywhere and a constant source of awful troubles. It was ONLY to be used as a fusible link from any iron core (C-Wire, 8 pair self-support, 6 pair self-support, Gopher Wire, ect) to LGBs, BGBs, or NIDs (and you shouldn’t take it to a NID, because a NID already has lightning shit in it.)
The assholes used Bridle Wire everywhere.
I’m rambling, but Bridle Wire was a pain in the ass. And it was a pain in the ass because the morons didn’t use it for the purpose for which it was designed.
I lived in the UK during the mid 70’s. Back then, cars there weren’t required to have safety glass in their windshields. Front-on collisions very often resulted in decapitation. Once, I was waiting in traffic for quite a while along the A-1 Motorway because the police were still looking for the victim’s head.
Just think of the PVC, as opposed to metal piping, in your homes, that is allowed by modern codes.
An efficient material, that is lethal when combustible.
Basically the same thing as that tower.
Then there is closed cell vs open cell stryfoam insultion not sure if that had ANY to do with that.
Also, and lastly, All building materials have what is called a ‘flame spread rating’, this insulation that was used was not maybe proven, not sure.
We all have some type of insulation in our homes, or businesses, that is not natural, toxic and combustible.
“Plenum!!”
Are you really going to tell me CMR verses CMP makes any difference? All that self leveling goo, and those fire-stop pillows?
“Oh! There was a hole, here!”
The fucking plenum zip ties?
Fucks sake.
…I’ve never seen a fire stop in the attic of an apartment building that didn’t have a hundred holes drilled in it and that wasn’t festooned with thrown strands of builder-grade wiring like a Christmas tree wrapped in lights by a six year old. Multi-family dwellings almost always went up on a) kitchen fires that were fought late, inappropriately (NEVER throw FLOUR on flames) or not at ALL, b) someone smoking in a bedroom and the cigarette gets away from them, c) extremely poor extension cord choices by residents, or d) children playing with fire.
Section 8 housing had some subcategories like casual arson, wire stealing gone wrong, fire alarms with no batteries ever, and meth production explosions, but that wasn’t every building in my day as the management tended to separate charity and market rate by building, so not every building was subject to mattresses set on fire in common foyers for a laugh.
Althogh I did see one once that went up because of romantic candlelight, but that’s a different subject for another day.
Apartment owners knew what they had. We actually had one developer of a new complex that had the balls to ask us to just let anything in their complex burn completely down, because it was easier and cheaper for them to just scrape the burned crap off the slab and start over fresh.
Needless to say,considering the lives and other people’s property that would be lost that way, as well as the complete lack of morals, ethics, and sense of duty that would require, we did not honor that request. But it speaks volumes of what they thought of their own construction that they would even ASK.
The structures I saw usually had individual to the unit heating and cooling, so plenum-grade wiring wasn’t really an issue due to the lack of plenums, but thus Greenfell Tower was a bigger structure and probably did have some common ventilation ducting, which usually contributes to the spread of toxic games, smoke, and actual fire If not built properly or shut down promptly. Such structures are usually testaments to why you shouldn’t stack poor people who drink as well, but that’s neither here nor there in this case, as the insulation burned both rapidly and topically.
I don’t know about this “green” stuff, but regular Styrofoam releases hydrocarbons, styrene, carbon, and formaldehyde among other things depending on how it was made that, along with plain old carbon monoxide, will kill everyone long before they feel the flames, anthogh those spread greedily on such as well. It’s a great combo if you want your residents dead because it will blind them, suffocate them, then roast the remains in very short order.
While I don’t doubt that “going Green” made things considerably worse here, apartment complexes as a whole tend to be cheaply built, poorly managed firetraps, and as a general rule I wouldn’t recommend putting any one or any thing in one that you aren’t willing to lose.
And that’s BEFORE you get to the CRIME endemic to such places, but that, too, a different story for another day…
You are surrounded by hydrocarbons pretty much everything has them in it, or coated with them. Better life thru chemistry was the phrase they used. Just be aware of your environment and always have an escape plan.
Anonymous
OCTOBER 26, 2020 AT 6:41 AM
“You are surrounded by hydrocarbons pretty much everything has them in it, or coated with them.”
..ok Science!, do you prefer Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons then? They hang out for years in some cases, make you throw up in low doses, cause confusion and eye irritation which is bad if you’re trying to find your way out of a burning apartment building, and can wreck your kidneys and your liver in higher doses, assuming you didn’t get lost on the way out of your single unit oven.
THAT kind of hydrocarbon.
…and to think that most people complain that I OVER explain…
Just figured it out, huh?
Only took 3 years to discover the obvious?
That was … like … over 2 years ago … dude …
Ancient history by contemporary standards – let’s just move on.
And seriously, nobody really gives a fuck about dead peasants.
izlamo delenda est …