Green Flames: London’s Lesson

[MechAg94]

http://blabber.buzz/politics/conservative-opinion/169605-green-flames-londons-lesson

From London to California’s Sun Valley, so-called green policies that disregard basic principles of fire safety are sparking deadly infernos.

I thought this looked interesting.  It is something something I see brought up occasionally, but rarely does it get a lot of national attention.  Essentially that "green" policies often have negative consequences.  The information about the green cladding on the building in London is interesting to me.  I was thinking that here fire regulations seem to trump everything else, but I guess that doesn't always hold true especially if people are willfully blind to the issue. 

Another link to the same article.
https://katiekieffer.com/2017/06/green-flames-londons-lesson/

[bedlamite]

A friend of mine and ended up with some "green" lighter fluid. The stuff wouldn't burn. It was a gel type stuff and there was a lump of it in the bottom of the grill afterwards.

[230RN]

....

[Firethorn]

In this case I wouldn't blame green policies.

They had a choice of two cladding panel types when doing this install.

The 'normal' and a fire resistant version.  The fire resistant version was something like 5 pounds more per square meter, so the flammable stuff went up.  Current theory is that the cladding caught fire, and got into the apartments through the plastic/vinyl window frames.

Government regulation over in the UK is apparently lacking when it comes to exterior wall treatments, from what I'm hearing.

[Hawkmoon]

In this case I wouldn't blame green policies.

They had a choice of two cladding panel types when doing this install.

The 'normal' and a fire resistant version.  The fire resistant version was something like 5 pounds more per square meter, so the flammable stuff went up.  Current theory is that the cladding caught fire, and got into the apartments through the plastic/vinyl window frames.

Government regulation over in the UK is apparently lacking when it comes to exterior wall treatments, from what I'm hearing.

Correct, except that the numbers I read were that the fire-resistive version cost $2 per square meter more. And yes on the windows -- the photos clearly showed the frames being warped and melted, so they pretty much had to be vinyl.

The building was originally constructed in the 1970s, and I have to wonder about building standards in the UK. The floor plan only had ONE central exit stair. There's no way a 24-story apartment building could have been built with a single exit stair in the United States, even back in the 1970s. It defies common sense.

[Hawkmoon]

Floor plan:



U.S. building codes require a minimum of two separate stairs from each upper story, and they must be "remote" -- which means the doors into the stairs have to be separated by a distance of not less than one-half the maximum diagonal of the floor served (1/3 if the building is sprinklered -- which Grenfell Tower was not).

[Edit] This plan may be wrong. Another (tiny) plan shows six apartments per typical story, and that's the only way they could have had 120 units. But the location of the single exit stair appears to be correct.

[Firethorn]

The building was originally constructed in the 1970s, and I have to wonder about building standards in the UK. The floor plan only had ONE central exit stair. There's no way a 24-story apartment building could have been built with a single exit stair in the United States, even back in the 1970s. It defies common sense.

Apparently by code they could get away with a single stairwell until quite recently.  That said, would an extra staircase have helped, given the the conditions would have probably filled both with smoke rather quickly?

Really, the only thing that might help would be to have interior space dedicated to chutes or something to the ground floor for escape.  At least once isolating a fire to a single apartment like designed fails.

That's why this was so bad - the fire found a way to move between apartments.

[KD5NRH]

Apparently by code they could get away with a single stairwell until quite recently.  That said, would an extra staircase have helped, given the the conditions would have probably filled both with smoke rather quickly?

Really, the only thing that might help would be to have interior space dedicated to chutes or something to the ground floor for escape.

At least one of the taller buildings I worked in several years ago has a completely separate ventilation system for the main stairwell, all entry doors are steel exterior doors opening into the elevator lobby at each floor, and propping them open was (at least at the time) one of the few ways to really get on management's bad side in a hurry.  With nothing inside the (concrete and steel) stairwell to burn, and as well isolated from the rest of the building's air as it could be without some really specialized doors/airlocks, it should stay usable in a fire up to the point where one or more of the lower doors burn through.

Interestingly, that one was also triangular, with enough space down the middle to hoist equipment up that way rather than using the cargo elevator.  An electric hoist with its own backup power (main purpose was to hoist fuel drums to the rooftop generators) was on the roof over a large hatch, and according to the overnight guard (after being an overnight guard for a few years myself, I now understand why the guy was so talkative) at least a couple of the maintenance guys on each shift were trained and regularly drilled in using the hoist and a litter to load and lower an incapacitated person safely from any floor to the basement tunnel access where they had a straight shot to a loading dock.  (Sounded fun, since one of the guys would have to ride down in a harness alongside the litter to make sure it didn't hang up on the stair rails, and control the landing.  Raising inanimate stuff was apparently easier, as it wouldn't move on its own to impart swing, and a bump would mean at most a little touch up paint on the stair rail.)  The other stairwell was a normal zigzag, and opened to secured parts of most floors, so it was "outbound only" unless you had a master key.

[Hawkmoon]

Apparently by code they could get away with a single stairwell until quite recently.  That said, would an extra staircase have helped, given the the conditions would have probably filled both with smoke rather quickly?

Really, the only thing that might help would be to have interior space dedicated to chutes or something to the ground floor for escape.  At least once isolating a fire to a single apartment like designed fails.

That's why this was so bad - the fire found a way to move between apartments.

In a building of that height, the exit stair(s) should have been pressurized to minimize smoke in the exits. Apparently that also wasn't required in the UK in the 1970s.

Even so, whether there were four or six apartments on each floor all the apartment entrance doors were quite close to the stair entrance. It should have been easy for people to get out of their apartments and into the comparative safety of the stair quickly. I saw at least one early report that indicated the alarms didn't sound. THAT would be a problem, especially when most people were probably sleeping.

[Firethorn]

The alarms thing is actually UK code.  The reasoning is that staying in the apartments is the safest choice, which is probably correct as long as the compartmentalization works as intended.  Excessive ringing of the fire alarms, quite common with 120 units, would merely lead to people ignoring and disabling them, by their thinking.

[RevDisk]

The probably worst nuclear accident in US history was when some absolute moron bought 'green' kitty liter instead of normal kitty litter. You basically dump nuclear waste in kitty litter for the same reason you put it in a litter box for cats. It acts as a general adsorbent. It's clay, so it's pretty damn inert. Good stuff, cheap, clean, etc. Aside from making sure it's reasonably pure, you can buy it in bulk for near the price of sand.

Someone decided CLAY was bad for the environment. And switched to 'organic' kitty litter, specifically Swheat Scoop. Shredded wheat, basically. ORGANIC IS BY DEFINITION NOT INERT MATERIAL. Naturally decay of organic material creates heat. So do some of the chemical interactions. Heating liquids expand. Which mean pressure explosion. With radiological material involved.

Because morons were allowed to make critical safety decisions based solely on alleged environmental concerns.

https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/03/f20/MARCH%202015%20-%20FINAL%20TECHNICAL%20ASSESSMENT%20TEAM%20REPORT.pdf

This should have been considered criminal grade stupidity.

[Nick1911]

The probably worst nuclear accident in US history was when some absolute moron bought 'green' kitty liter instead of normal kitty litter. You basically dump nuclear waste in kitty litter for the same reason you put it in a litter box for cats. It acts as a general adsorbent. It's clay, so it's pretty damn inert. Good stuff, cheap, clean, etc. Aside from making sure it's reasonably pure, you can buy it in bulk for near the price of sand.

Someone decided CLAY was bad for the environment. And switched to 'organic' kitty litter, specifically Swheat Scoop. Shredded wheat, basically. ORGANIC IS BY DEFINITION NOT INERT MATERIAL. Naturally decay of organic material creates heat. So do some of the chemical interactions. Heating liquids expand. Which mean pressure explosion. With radiological material involved.

Because morons were allowed to make critical safety decisions based solely on alleged environmental concerns.

https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/03/f20/MARCH%202015%20-%20FINAL%20TECHNICAL%20ASSESSMENT%20TEAM%20REPORT.pdf

This should have been considered criminal grade stupidity.

Read some of the PDF.  That's impressively bad.

Waste facility requirements are no free liquid and a neutral pH?  Cool, dump KolorSafe neutralizer in till the color changes, then absorb it into some wheat based commercial cat litter and ship it on!

[agricola]

The alarms thing is actually UK code.  The reasoning is that staying in the apartments is the safest choice, which is probably correct as long as the compartmentalization works as intended.  Excessive ringing of the fire alarms, quite common with 120 units, would merely lead to people ignoring and disabling them, by their thinking.

As originally designed, the advice to stay in your home unless advised otherwise was sensible (even in this case the LFB actually put the fridge fire out before realising that the cladding was alight) - all the blocks were mainly of brick or concrete construction and there was no way for a fire to spread (quite a lot of these blocks were really, really badly maintained or not maintained at all for much of the 70s and 80s, were a byword for slum housing ... and they did not go on fire).  Of course then some bright spark then decided to connect all the flats together, and then an even brighter spark tried to save money by using flammable products to do so.  The end result was the Lakanal House fire - the lessons of which seem now to have been ignored - and now this horror. 

As for the alarms, IIRC they've always had to have fire alarms in the communal areas (ie: separate from the little ones in people's homes) and it does appear that these didn't work for whatever reason.  There is also a complete mismatch between what regulations require in businesses (weekly fire alarm tests, clear evacuation plans) and blocks of flats. 

[HankB]

Being "Green" brought down a space shuttle. The foam insulation on the fuel tank was switched to a "green" foam, and before the disaster, NASA'S OWN PUBLIC WEBSITE noted that chunks of the "green" foam were coming off. But since it was "green" NASA couldn't/wouldn't switch back. A few missions later a chunk of it came off and knocked a hole in the orbiter's heat shield, which caused loss of the vehicle over Texas during re entry.

Being "Green" contributed to the WTC collapse. During construction of the WTC, they switched from asbestos fireproofing to "something else" about halfway up the building. One of the engineers or architects was later quoted as saying that if a major fire from a plane crash happened above a certain floor, the building was coming down. Then, many years later - 9/11 happened. Sure, there's debate about whether or not asbestos would have provided enough fireproofing when there was THAT much fuel burning, but nobody can debate that the "green" stuff didn't work.

A friend of mine and ended up with some "green" lighter fluid. The stuff wouldn't burn. It was a gel type stuff and there was a lump of it in the bottom of the grill afterwards.

And for another homeowner's issue . . . the "green" bug killers and weed preventers I can buy now don't work anywhere near as well as diazinon, dursban, or betasan did.

[MechAg94]

Environmental initiatives/mandates are certainly not a universal cause of disaster.  However, when they are applied with no regard to safety or good design practices, they certainly can cause problems/deaths.  

[230RN]

Reminds me of the "green" insulation they are putting in new car wiring which seems to be just yummy for gnawing critters.

[just Warren]

That layout reminds me of the mega-block where the last Judge Dredd movie was set.

[Doggy Daddy]

Anybody know what the circled area on the floor plan is?

[just Warren]

It's in an alcove right outside the largest unit. So maybe this floorplan shows the manager's floor and that is a drop off spot for something that the manager needs access to..

Or it could be a mail or garbage chute.

[agricola]

Anybody know what the circled area on the floor plan is?

its almost certainly the rubbish chute.

[K Frame]

In the United States it would generally mean some sort of fixture, like a water heater or a water storage tank, but those would normally have a label in them like WH or WT

And, what makes me think that it's not a water heater is that those are normally placed in utility closets with a mop sink, and there's nothing like that here. Again, the standards and codes might be different in Britain

[RoadKingLarry]

And for another homeowner's issue . . . the "green" bug killers and weed preventers I can buy now don't work anywhere near as well as diazinon, dursban, or betasan did

You can have my chlordane when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

[Doggy Daddy]

And, what makes me think that it's not a water heater is that those are normally placed in utility closets with a mop sink, and there's nothing like that here. Again, the standards and codes might be different in Britain

Yeah, it's odd.  The only apartment that requires you to go through 2 doors and past the water heater to use the main entrance to the living room.  Just strikes me as odd.

Also, I'm not going to total up the square footage (meterage?) of each apartment, but I'm not going to bet that one is actually the largest.  The living room is larger than the other three, but not by much.  And there are some variations on the other rooms' areas between the 4 units.

[K Frame]

Oh, wait...

That's a residential schematic. I don't know why I thought it was a commercial space.

It might be a water heater then.

If it's actually IN an apartment space, I wouldn't think it would be a rubbish shaft. Those are normally in common areas serving a number of apartments. At least that's how they do it in the United States.

[KD5NRH]

That would be an awfully small water heater for four kitchens and eight bathrooms.