
Why Grenfell Tower Burned: Regulators Put Cost Before Safety - Dowwie
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/world/europe/grenfell-tower-london-fire.html
======
matt4077
It's quite obviously a result of the asinine narrative of how "regulations are
strangling businesses"–see quote below.

There's nothing wrong with naming specific regulatory requirements that you
believe are onerous. But repeating the generic attack on any and all
regulations is just a populistic attempt to hollow out the power of
government, and leads to such disasters, and many smaller injuries to people,
property, or the environment that don't get this sort of publicity.

    
    
        A 2005 law known as the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) 
        Order ended a requirement for government inspectors to
        certify that buildings had met fire codes, and shifted
        instead to a system of self-policing. Governments adopted 
        slogans calling for the elimination of at least one 
        regulation for each new one that was imposed, and the 
        authorities in charge of fire safety took this to heart.

~~~
dom0
> to hollow out the power of government,

It's important to remember that in many matters, the government _are_ the
people.

------
dsr_
Wait, regulators are at fault?

No. Whosoever built the firetrap and chose this cladding is primarily at
fault.

The regulators are _secondarily_ at fault, for allowing it.

Arconic is also secondarily at fault, for selling a cladding material that
they are required in several nations to warn against using on tall buildings,
but did not warn against in the UK.

Leading with "it's all the fault of those laws that allowed us to do it" is
asinine.

~~~
akkartik
It is your comment that is asinine.

 _" Mr. Adam 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, they lost
their lives."_

If you're consistent, I expect you think the fire brigade is only
_secondarily_ at fault for the crap instructions? It was the people's fault
for following the crap instructions?

Regulations are a device for division of labor and education. They exist
partly to tell us what to do so we don't have to understand everything from
first principles.

~~~
Spooky23
The fire brigade or other public safety people give out instructions like this
because they are looking at preserving life in the aggregate. Panic striken
families clogging the single stairway makes it more difficult for first
responders to respond.

I've been involved in a few minor disasters in 15-25 story high rises. One was
a roof fire, another was a kitchen fire halfway up, another was a catastrophic
leak of water and glycol from the heating system, and the last was a thick
cloud of smoke from a nearby oil-fired power plant that suddenly shutdown
during the blackout in 2003. Guess what? There were catastrophic fuckups in
every event (fire alarm failure, water pressure failure, firefighters sent to
the wrong place, etc). But the SOP was always the same regardless of the
situation -- stay in place.

At the risk of admitting to being a selfish asshole, I'll come out and say --
fuck that. I will be bugging out, and I'll tell anyone I know to do the same.
I'd rather die trying to get out than getting trapped like the poor souls in
this building or WTC.

------
mc32
The tragedy exposes some interesting data:

Fire deaths per thousand are lower in the UK compared to the US due to fire
regulation --which are a result of lessons learned from The Great Fire, on the
other hand the materials they used on that building (as well as some other UK
blds) are banned in most advanced economies. Additionally, the manufacturer
states the cladding should not be used on anything higher than a ladder engine
can reach. So while the material is a poor choice in any regard, the builder
was egregious in utilizing it on a structure where ladder engines could not
reach the highest floors.

------
jostmey
I wonder where the boiling point lies--where the lower class, without
opportunity and safety decides to overthrow the current political systems. It
happens over the course of history, and many societies are slowly inching
toward political revolution

~~~
s_kilk
I suspect we may be close to it.

There is a palpable anger, all throughout the UK right now, directed against
the ruling class. We've all known instinctively that the ruling class don't
care about us, but now it's real and painfully visible.

------
pmoriarty
This reminds me of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire[1], where owners also
put profits before safety.

 _" The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911
was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of
the deadliest in US history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers
-- 123 women and 23 men -- who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or
falling or jumping to their deaths ..._

 _" Because the owners had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits -- a
then-common practice to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to
reduce theft -- many of the workers who could not escape from the burning
building simply jumped from the high windows. The fire led to legislation
requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the
International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), which fought for better
working conditions for sweatshop workers."_

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Company)

~~~
zkms
The tragic thing is that the wet-pipe fire sprinkler has existed for around
140 years -- this is 1880s-vintage technology! The fundamental design is very
simple -- a network of pipes, pressurised with water (from a tank or the
municipal water supply and individual and replaceable sprinkler heads, each
with its own heat-activated valve (initially with a melting fusible link, in
1922, the glass-bulb sprinkler was released) and deflector. The alarm valve,
which activates a bell once water is flowing inside the system came later, in
the 1890s.

 _Nothing_ else can get extinguishing agent onto fire faster than a sprinkler
system. A room can flash over in a little over two minutes, and not even the
best fire brigade can get there _that_ fast. A hundred litres of water per
minute _per tripped sprinkler head_ (and sprinklers will have activated well
before the room they're in flashes over) puts an end to most fires with
extreme prejudice. If the fire hasn't gone out by the time the fire brigade
pulls up, the firefighters can hook up their pumps to external connections to
the sprinkler network, which will increase the water pressure/flow inside the
sprinkler pipes to get more water onto the offending blaze.

This is not newfangled experimental nonsense, this is boring, well-
established, and reliable technology. Sprinklers control fires so well, even
in unsafe buildings, to the point that some designers neglect _passive_ fire
protection -- it's a bad idea to to depend on a single mechanism for critical
applications like fire safety since there's always the possibility of the fire
sprinkler system being manually turned off or otherwise malfunctioning. Fire
deaths in buildings with operating fire sprinkler systems are rare
([http://www.nfpa.org/~/media/files/news-and-research/fire-
sta...](http://www.nfpa.org/~/media/files/news-and-research/fire-
statistics/fire-protection-systems/ossprinklers.pdf?la=en)), there's about 80%
less fatalities and almost all fatalities in sprinklered buildings are of
victims who were present at the location the fire started -- sprinklers can't
undo the damage from the event that started the fire.

Most fire deaths _are_ avoidable with century-old technology. It's tragic and
depressing to see the never-ending trickle of fire fatalities (punctured by
ghastly mass casualty incidents like the Grenfell fire) knowing that around
80% of them would have made it out alive had they been in a building with a
functioning sprinkler system. This _should be a well-solved problem_ , for
fuck's sake, there's no technical reason why most occupied buildings connected
to a municipal water system can't have some bloody sprinklers. Grenfell tower
should have had sprinklers, the Triangle Shirtwaist building should have had
sprinklers, and it's a failure of society that every building built less than
a century ago and connected to municipal water supply doesn't have sprinklers.

------
jstalin
Maybe someone in the UK can answer this, but how on earth are fire sprinklers
not required?

~~~
rjsw
The tower block wasn't originally built with the cladding that burnt.

The idea was that the tower is almost all concrete, a fire on any one floor
shouldn't spread as there is little to burn. The problem is that later
modifications to the heating system and the addition of the cladding have
changed the design a lot.

~~~
_delirium
Fwiw regulations actually have been getting more conservative on this. There
was more confidence in the 1970s (when this tower was built) that modern
concrete construction didn't require sprinklers. With the core construction
material itself not flammable, and serving as fireproof separation between
units, fires were supposed to be contained by design, with spread unit-to-unit
throughout the building (especially so rapidly that it'd happen before fire
services could arrive) not being possible due to passive suppression, and
therefore not in need of active suppression. Which as you say may even have
been true with the original design prior to interior ducting and exterior
cladding changes.

In any case, in the past 10 years the consensus has been changing towards it
being prudent to just always require sprinklers in high-rise towers. Scotland
began requiring them in 2005, and England in 2007, but neither law is
retroactive.

------
Theodores
Parapet walls are a feature of London that I point out to tourists, explaining
the context of 1666:

[https://www.locallocalhistory.co.uk/schools/preperation/fire...](https://www.locallocalhistory.co.uk/schools/preperation/fire-
regs.htm)

350 years later we find that the lessons learned by our ancestors have been
forgotten.

There is also the matter of the fridge/freezer, the alleged culprit. I am
fairly sure that the fire brigade have got that right, you can trace a fire
back to the start, much to the frustration of any arsonist! I am glad it was a
fridge and not someone smoking or sitting around with candles. However, I am
shocked at people's attitude towards leaving the house with appliances on.
Washing machines are known to catch fire, as are tumble driers, but people
don't care.

I did check the fridge freezer in question to see if it was one of the really
stupidly designed ones that have all the gubbins at the bottom rather than the
back. Sounds like it was a 'normal' design rather than one of the ones
'specifically designed to catch fire'.

The 'easy burn' fridge/freezer variants don't have the cooling metalwork at
the back but at the bottom, with a fan to bring air in through a 4" or so high
gap at the bottom of the fridge/freezer. What happens with this design is that
the dirt and dust that collects on the floor in the kitchen gets sucked in,
for the fans to get completely blocked with debris. If you pull off the
plastic and get that dirt out it is like emptying the bag from a vacumn
cleaner that nobody has emptied in months/years. Nobody thinks to clean out
the bottom of these things so after a few years the whole thing gets replaced
- warranty expired, too expensive to 'get the man out' to fix it.

Only if you are handy with a screwdriver and skint would you deduce and fix
the problem yourself. By then the fuse has gone from the motor trying too hard
to work so it is easy for the 'technically minded' to replace the fuse and be
pleased that their ice cream isn't going to melt. To go to the next step and
fix the problem that caused the fuseboard to trip (i.e. dust build up) doesn't
happen, instead flipping the fuseboard on becomes just a routine thing you do.

I appreciate the action taken in light of Grenfell with Camden council
evacuating the towers with the wrong cladding but I think more needs to be
done on the fridge/freezer problem, particularly with flawed designs that
really are 'built in obsolescence' due to the simple dust build up problem
that people just do not know about.

~~~
pja
> There is also the matter of the fridge/freezer, the alleged culprit.

Not alleged: It’s known that this is how the fire started.

The fire was called in by the resident of the flat when their fridge caught
fire. The fire service came, put the fire _out_ in the flat and exited the
building. Only at that point did they discover that the fire had spread to the
outer skin of the building & they had a major incident on their hands.

------
Pica_soO
Could removing something that endangers your life, from the building you life
in- be seen as a pre-selfdefense measure?

------
imdsm
I don't like to get political on HN, so if this appear so, I apologise.

The problem, I think, is that people don't want to pay, but people want to
spend. We want low taxes but high quality public services. We want low taxes
but we want high quality social housing.

While the books of a country must be immensely complex, it can be distilled to
a very simple money in, money out equation, and when a country is running at a
higher money out than money in, you're getting into debt. Cutting this means
cutting state funded things, from services to buildings, etc.

It's not right to use dangerous materials, but if we have less money to spend,
or if we prioritise things wrongly, things like this will happen.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Countries can run deficits. Countries can inflate away their debts. Countries
can stimulate the economy to make it grow quickly enough to outpace the growth
of debt.

I'd love someone who _really believes_ in the theories behind austerity
politics to explain to me how the postwar boom ever happened -- not just in
the USA, but all across the Western world and the Asian Tigers.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
You can but you there are limits, if your debt is large enough then you can't
outgrow it. Just printing money has it's problems, in this case inflation
would make safe building materials more expensive to import.

I know people like to bang on about running the economy being different from
running your household finances but that only goes so far. The UK is already
spending 8% of tax revenue just on servicing debt.

~~~
rwmj
The UK could run a larger deficit. The source / sums are done here:
[http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbli...](http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2017/06/a-case-
against-austerity.html)

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Why would we, growth has been ticking along nicely for a developed country
(apart from a blip in 2008/9 when the financial crisis hit). Also unemployment
has been remarkably low over the last couple of years.

The trouble is eventualy that debt needs to be paid off, either through
raising taxes or monetisation. Monetisation is bad as it increases inflation.
Increasing taxes lowers spending causing smaller economic activity. All we
have done is passed a burden off to the next generation.

~~~
rwmj
Interest rates are _negative_ in real terms - read the article I linked to.
This means we could have free (in a very literal sense) infrastructure -- new
railways, broadband, houses, etc.

The second point is that infrastructure supports growth (if done right, there
are of course many ways to do it wrong), so just because headline GDP was so-
so over the last decade doesn't mean it couldn't be better. Compared to the
US, UK growth was rather poor and recovery from the crash has taken forever.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I did read the article. There is no free, that debt needs to be paid back at
some point, passing that burden on to our children is irresponsible.

It's rather silly to compare the US to the UK, financial services makes up a
larger part of the UK economy than it does in the US so of course we had a
greater impact from the financial crisis.

~~~
rwmj
Debt at a negative real interest rate is literally free money. Investors are
judging it's better to get a guarantee of slightly less value (slightly more
nominal money), than invest it in riskier investments where they might lose a
lot more. Furthermore investment in the right things (which I admitted above
can be hard) should promote growth, thus growing away the debt even more as a
% of GDP. This is all pretty basic economics.

