Yea, you’ve hit it on the head. The headline is designed to stir outrage at one particular party, anger which i think is justified but ultimately the real culpable party are the politicians that changed the building and fire codes to be more lax.
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That’s your choice. And one I’d agree with (then again I don’t have fire extinguisher handy at home).
Yup. And when would it last have been tested?
Even when people have fire extinguishers, they’re not exactly ‘buy and forget’ technology. A fire extinguisher that was bought 10+ years ago may be of no use whatsover in a fire even if you know where it is.
That’s why UK regulations don’t make them mandatory for domestic premises.
Leaving aside the fact that most fires these days are likely to be electrical, so you’d need a CO2 extinguisher which is not exactly stuff Governments want to encourage people to have sitting around for years on end, almost inevitably without maintenance.
I don’t know whether Grenfell had extinguisher available on the landings or not. I would expect not.
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I do now after my son burned his car to a crisp after getting stuck in a ditch late at night. The heat from the engine caught the grass underneath on fire and by the time the fire truck came the car was a total loss. A $10 fire extinguisher would have saved the day.
I make sure all our cars have extinguishers in them now along with a full emergency kit.
This is my son’s car after. A shame too as it was a rather nice M3.
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Your slide 46.png states that the insulation wasn’t the deciding factor. That’s essentially what the panel company’s submissions take issue with.
See paras. 30-43 of the written submissions.
As far as I can tell their argument is that the insulation would have caught fire first and the cladding (being initially fire-resistant) would have acted as a chimney given all the other cock-ups. That would have increased the heat to the point that the cladding is no longer fire-resistant and then of course it was all over.
I have no idea whether that’s accurate or not of course.
It all seems to add up to all the various components relying on all the other components doing their bit to slow/withstand flame for long enough to evacuate/extinguish the fire and when several of them failed to do so (either through being the wrong kind of component for the role they were given or being incompetently installed), the whole system was hopelessly compromised.
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…because they weren’t. They were the company that legitimately manufactured materials. The company ‘behind’ it (if any one) is the TMO (deliberately at arm’s length from the Council) and their refurbishment main contractors.
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I just recently checked for the fire extinguishers in the kitchen and the garage, and realized that I don’t have one in the wooden shed with all the power tools and the sawdust and aluminum shavings and gas cans and now the propane heater. But I have got one in the truck. But not the car.
Which reminds me to schedule monthly checks of the pressure in each of the extinguishers.
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I have a fire extinguisher in my car too, and my laundry room, and my workshop. I don’t understand why people are so extinguisher adverse.
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Probably having one in the shed with all that stuff isn’t going to help you if it starts to burn. Your shed’s gonna be gone pretty quick. I think what you want is to have one outside the shed so you can keep it from spreading.
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Exactly! It’s embarrassing.
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No. The first thing to go are the window panes. The glass will blow away a long time before the frame starts to burn. And at this point it simply doesn’t matter whether the frame will burn or not.
just because you have a fire extinguisher, doesn’t mean you are lord of all things fire. Is your extinguisher the right type for the type of fire you are fighting? (yes there are different types and using something like water on an electrical fire gets you dead) Do you have a large enough capacity extinguisher for the fire? Do you have a safe and clear exit path to egress from the area? has the alarm been sounded because usually there are people paid to do this kind of thing and have training to keep them safe. has your building in accordance with local fire laws been designed to properly seal and contain(usually calculated in minutes of containment) an area in the event of a fire to allow fire crews time to respond or does the entire building catch fire in 10 minutes or less? fighting a fire is a judgement call made in a split second, surviving a fire shouldn’t be.
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Also good thing to consider is what kind of fire extinguisher to use depending on the nature of the fire. If its an oil fire in the kitchen the last thing you want to do is point straight at the fire since all someone would accomplish is making everything worse.
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well the temperature of the fire is then the property of the glass making the news but the frame is supposed to support the glass
The glass goes first, no matter what kind of frame holds it.
Ad hoc example, relevant bit starts around 2:25.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0gnGXpzvB1Q
If the building’s facade is on fire, the fire will blow out the window panes and jump into the room.
I was actually referring to the exterior temperature that is the sum total
OR, maybe the ideal plan is to fight fire with fire, and keep a lot of combustible material around the outside of my shed so that I can backburn toward it!
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I hate being monoglot
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Good news! The Boing Boing Store has fabulous offers to deal with that!
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Irrelevant.
Still.
Yes. Except perhaps not if there are visible air gaps around the frames - as was apparently, to some extent, the case in Grenfell. Badly fitted windows were on the long list of faults with the refurbishment, I think I remember reading.
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