Is the guarantee high on this company? I don’t see how limiting the exposure of board members to debt would automatically lead to cost cutting. I would think it would be the opposite or is cost cutting just de riguer for companies limited by guarantee? Where was the funding coming from for this building?
You can be certain there was a gap - in current best practice cladding like this is installed as a “rain screen” with a gap behind it standing off from the other substrates. And yes, perfect for a chimney effect.
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Automatic cost cutting: Basically, if it’s government funded, they will look to do it as cheaply as possible.
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Last night watching the BBC World News broadcast I heard that the fire brigade wasn’t shooting water pas the 10th floor. Is this is limit of the London fire brigade’s pumpers capability?
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Throw in austerity, and that RBKC is mostly a rich conservative voting area while Grenfall Tower is poor and voted for the Labour minority in the council.
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You know … it’s all the fault of the EU. Those bananas don’t bend themselves, ehm and oh my gosh those firefighter regulations from Brussels, you got no idea … look I just drew a picture of Junckers and Merckel with swastika armbands!
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Depressingly, I could see the Scum and Daily Fail trying to claim that.
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When people talk about income disparity, its usually framed as a fairness issue. Which sounds perfectly legitimate as long as you’re in among the 99%, or believe your interests are those of the 99%.
For those who’ll never have to rub elbows with the rest of us, or for those temporarily embarassed millionaires who aspire to not have to care once their ship arrives-fairness is a terribly abstract concept that doesn’t really take hold in the conscience the way “normal” people might expect.
This is why (among other reasons, like being aspie as hell) I favor arguments having to do with design theory, over moral responsibility. While its much less pronounced, the rich are also inconvenienced when the rest of us die avoidable deaths, they certainly don’t twirl their moustaches and cackle.(excepting outliers like dick cheney)
Giving a tiny minority sole access to design issues that impact everyone is poor design. The richest of us are not as smart as all of us, and in a lot of ways they’re even dumber than the poorest of us.
What keeps the revolution from swooping in and wiping the slate clean and making everything different if not better, is the percieved inconvenience of it all. We’re conditioned to feel as if things will improve on their own if we just give the system a chance, and clinging to that false hope is far more convenient than jumping in taking risks, and trusting ourselves and each other to know our own best interests.
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Years ago, I read a rule of thumb for fire safety in tall buildings. Basically, it said staying anywhere above the 7th floor, people were far less likely to make it out. This was partly due to the limits of fire fighting equipment. The other consideration was how long it takes to get down the stairs from the upper floors. It takes a long time during a drill when conditions are good, so we can imagine how difficult it becomes when affected by smoke and heat.
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Public housing in the UK has long turned into a racket for well-connected individuals. Basically councils have sold off most of their stock, due to pressure from Thatcher (and all subsequent governments) to lower expenses. Houses were passed to companies run by well-positioned cronies, for very low prices; these companies collect rent, making money that ends up spent mostly on salaries. Any extra work inevitably ends up either paid by the local authority one way or the other, or done in the cheapest possible way. So councils can wash their hands of it, for the most part, while their cronies collect good money. In other countries it would be called corruption or mafia; in England it’s just the way it is.
Edit: this is not unique to housing, btw. Pretty much all “privatisation” schemes, past and present, end up being scams that benefit people in key roles. In my lifetime, and over two countries, I’ve still to see one such scheme that doesn’t end up with “crony X makes millions, public service degrades”.
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Im a landlord. I can tell you one of the things that keeps me awake at night is the idea that someone dies in one of my apartments. However the guy I bought the building from didnt feel the same way. He taped over a faulty heat sensor to stop it tripping the alarm rather than replace it - cost of replacing is about $150.
Strange really.
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Exactly. People forget that the whole reason for the rules in the first place is that usually a lot of people died horribly.
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I have a small commercial property so I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve tolerated tenants who did not pay, and others that sipped the utilities from my property to the adjacent property. All that is day in day out of managing a property.
Its totally different when moneyed landlords lobby for a reduction in regulation and oversight as a method of increasing profit. And criminal when that practice leads to harm.
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I appreciate your tone of horrified cynicism, but I fail to see how this is a response to my comment. Funding public services is a wholly domestic issue (austerity) not an EU regulation red herring. It is funding pure and simple, not regulation (from EU or anywhere closer to home) that hampers our firefighters. And despite the other reply, I doubt even the Scum and Fail would try that on.
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Yes, but this block was built before Thatcher, and while much of the blame will surely be due to inadequate safeguards during the last remodel and due to the the Borough turning a deaf ear to warnings, the bad design (with insufficient exits) can’t be pinned on The Thatch. I honestly wouldn’t trust any high rise in Britain built between 1950 and entry into the EU, the building code allowed too many shortcuts.
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No, it makes sense. Improving standards and technology means fewer firefighters are required to provide the same or better standards of safety, so the cuts were to a degree justified. But, like the dwarves, May and the Tories dug too deep and too greedily.
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BBC are reporting that the building had no internal sprinkler system as it was constructed in 1974 before they were mandated. New buildings must have them, but in the last couple of years the Tory government filibustered a proposed change to the law that would have required sprinklers to be retrofitted to older buildings. Seems pretty culpable.
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I didn’t say it was; I said these blocks were sold after Thatcher. The Tories pushed for all councils to free themselves of housing stock ever since, one way or the other. Consequences have been very dire in a lot of places.
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Apparently there is a UK law that protects that quality of housing for ‘poor’ tenants, but the definition of who is ‘poor’ and protected by the law hasn’t been updated since the 1950s, and as a result the law currently only protects tenants who pay less than £80 a year in rent, i.e. precisely no-one is protected. Also apparently the outside of the building was recently clad in thermal insulation foam which it will turn out was highly flammable.
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Further to my post above: theage.com.au/world/london-fire-grenfell-tower-may-have-been-renovated-with-deadly-cladding-20170614-gwr9qf.html
In the Melbourne fire, if I recall correctly, the supposedly ‘fire-retardant’ interlayer was… polystyrene. And newspapers, I think.
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