When firefighters arrived at the rapidly worsening fire in the 24-story Grenfell tower they were witness to a horror. Residents at the window, unable to find safe passage away from the encroaching flames, screaming for help.
Flames consumed the tower so quickly that arriving firefighters wondered if they could even get inside. People trapped on the higher floors screamed for their lives through broken windows. At least 79 people died, a toll that is expected to rise as more bodies are recovered. Survivors have charged that the facade was installed to beautify their housing project for the benefit of wealthy neighbors.
There is little doubt that many whose last words were a scream succumbed, it is also likely that the presently agreed total of 79 dead will grow. Some who died may never be found, their remains combined with the dust and ash that is left in the incinerated apartments of Grenfell. Some of them were following the urging of the fire department to stay behind the doors of their apartment — which was in effect a death sentence.
“Don’t open the front door,” her neighbor told her. “You are not going to be able to breathe — you are just going to bring the smoke in. You have your children. Standing near the door with all the smoke is not going to help you.”
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The fire service said it received 600 calls from the building that night, some lasting an hour. Speaking in Arabic over a telephone, Ms. Ibrahim said: “We are on the last floor. The last floor is the one that has not caught fire yet.”
Then, a few moments later, she said: “It’s over. It is here.”
All of this happened because of money. What is shocking is just how little cash is involved.
The primary component of the building structure providing fuel for the fire was a polyethylene filled aluminum cladding panel on the buildings exterior. Marketed by Arconic (previously known as aluminum products giant Alcoa) under the tradename Reynobond PE, these panels were chosen for their aesthetic appeal, and lower cost — versus a fire-resistant version.
£5000 — ($6400), that is how much extra the safer cladding would cost. Less than £64 per deceased victim of this short-sighted, penny-pinching approach to planning through deregulation.
Omnis Exteriors manufactured the aluminium composite material (ACM) used in the cladding, a company director, John Cowley, confirmed to the Guardian.
He also said Omnis had been asked to supply Reynobond PE cladding, which is £2 cheaper per square metre than the alternative Reynobond FR, which stands for “fire resistant” to the companies that worked on refurbishing Grenfell Tower.
Cladding Grenfell Tower would require 2500 square meter of panels, hence a £5000 cost-saving by eschewing the safer choice.
Now, fire-resistant is not fireproof. All it really means is that the fire resistant (FR) grade burns sufficiently slowly that the fire does not leap unconstrained from floor to floor along the building exterior. Thus, to be a truly safe building you would wish to have all other reasonable means of fire safety incorporated into any building refurbishment.
The most obvious improvement would be ensuring that a fire-suppression system was in place and in full working order. Which it was not. I mean, not present, at all.
There was no sprinkler system in Grenfell tower. In fact, in dozens of similar high-rises, often housing the poorer amongst the city’s population, no sprinkler systems, no fire-suppression system of any type is installed.
This is explicitly because of the UK government’s unwillingness to place the safety of their citizenry ahead of cold, hard cash. More than one chance arose to require that existing multi-unit buildings be equipped with sprinkler systems. The first was in 2007, when — for the first time in the UK — certain new construction was required to include such protection.
While fire sprinkler systems have been required in new high-rise residential buildings in England since 2007, we are still lacking legislation that would provide fire safety in existing buildings of this type.
The extension of fire protection regulations to existing structures was the subject of discussion in 2011, study in 2012, and was revisited as recently as 2014 — when such extension was precluded by the Tory minister responsible on the basis of inconvenience to developers.
As the death toll from the Grenfell Tower blaze rose to 12, it emerged Brandon Lewis, who was recently promoted to immigration minister, said in 2014 that building developers should not be forced to fit sprinklers.
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He added: “The cost of fitting a fire sprinkler system may affect house building – something we want to encourage – so we must wait to see what impact that regulation has.”
I think we can conclude the impact of the Tories laissez-faire approach to building regulation is death, currently at 79 and counting.
The effectiveness of sprinklers in slowing the spread of a vertical fire, accelerated by the Reynobond cladding, is also fairly clear. Despite being banned from use in high-rise construction in many locations around the world, the UK is not alone in permitting use of this clearly dangerous product. A high-rise in Dubai most recently suffered a massive fire from the same cause.
Although fire sprinkler systems are not designed to control or extinguish exterior fires, experience has shown that they can play a major role in providing fire safety during such events. In both the Monte Carlo casino hotel fire in Las Vegas in 2008 and the Sulafa Dubai residential high-rise fire in Dubai in 2017, individual sprinklers activated to prevent the exterior fires from entering the building, and no fire deaths took place.
The 2012 study, by an interested industry group, BAFSA, concluded that for £1150 per apartment a full high-rise could be retrofitted with a new sprinkler system. Grenfell contained 120 units, making the projected cost somewhere north of £138,000, or in round numbers less than 2 percent of the £10 million budget for Grenfell’s 2016 refurbishment.
Our running total of cost per victim is now, in round figures £1810, $2310 per person.
We now know how little those screaming faces in the window of Grenfell Tower were worth.