Quote:
Originally Posted by Pedestrian
This is the wonderful European style public housing:
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I think you'll find the horrific Grenfell fire was due to the cladding, that they had used to make the building look nicer and be more environmentally sustainable. As a social housing project Grenfell would have been fireproof (insofar as any fire in the building would have been confined to the one flat), however thanks to the new cladding the fire raced from the 4th floor to the roof within 20 minutes. The firefighters were dumbstruck as how that could even happen on a tower block - and one of the main mistakes highlighted in the Public Enquiry was how the fire experts didn't know/ weren't ever prepared for a cladding-spread fire that thus defied all their rescue scenarios - for such tower blocks a 'stay put' order is enforced for all other apartments as the concrete contains blazes within the rooms. In other tower block fires people are killed from trying to escape and breathing in fumes, rather than staying put.
This is what a normal tower block fire should look like - note the cladding went up and spread the fire, but none of the other cladding-less apartments caught it:
A great deal of questions were raised about the social infrastructure at large in the area (and the hierarchy as to why the world's richest ward had the world's most unsafe death trap), but it's not the social housing that killed the residents, it was by far the Celotex cladding they were installing, which literally hundreds of buildings across the country use, from office blocks to student halls (apartments with such cladding have seen their prices fall from $775,000 to $115,000). Also bear in mind Grenfell was not just social housing where the small 2 bed flats were rented at $3,200 per month, and worth up to half a million $.
In short it was when Grenfell Tower started getting away from social housing, cladding itself into a nice looking facade for the private market in the world's richest borough, that made itself into a death trap:
Before and after:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/380411...london-latest/
https://www.standard.co.uk/Front/lon...-a3565416.html