27 storey block of flats on fire in London.

[DoctorTwo]

BBC link. Holy shit, almost the entire building is ablaze. Hope everybody got out safely.

I would see who the builder is? It looks like maybe an electric fault (no fire alarms went off) and the fire just roared up the (cosmetic) cladding like a taper.

I am absolutely impressed at the dignity of the eye witnesses interviewed by the BBC this morning.

Devastating.

Horrific. Especially the people knowing there is no way to get out. That absolute terror. I have no words.

One resident said there had been a new gas installation recently (as currently they just have electricity not gas in the flats) and he had seen the pipes. He wonders as the flames were in part blue whether it was gas.

The worst bit for me was 999 and others told people to stay in their flats and that decision in many cases seems to have mean they died rather than escaping.

If it was the cladding I can't understand how the fire in the centre of the building was so intense

It appeared to be inside and spreading out wards onto the cladding

I think the cladding just spread it. Like a trail of petrol and a lit match.

The cladding fire burst the windows, and the flats' interiors burst into flames, which is how the interior inferno happened. Just awful.

My guess is the new gas installation (or a kitchen fire) took hold rapidly and as the outside was cladded like that it was even worse. Sometimes concrete awful looking tower blocks the architect designed in concrete to reduce fire risk have to stay looking awful perhaps if this kind of cladding ignites to badly.

I wonder what the lay out is for external stairs. A lot of tower blocks have an escape down the side outside down stairs, not just the lifts and not just internal stairs although the heat was so bad here that may be even external stairs were total inferno.

If the building is found to have been unsafe what will happen to others built the same way?

You buy a flat in a newly built high rise building . You go along to the owners meeting and say: "I have doubts about the safety of our building. Is the cladding really up to fire safe specification? Are the materials in it actually asbestos free? I mean, both of them came stamped by the manufacturers they are asbestos free and safe... but is the stamp accurate.? Can we vote on testing?"

Whereupon everybody in the room is deathly silent and ashen faced, waying up safety Vs the $$$$$ its going to cost if things are tested and fail.

But, hey, it might not even matter. If you have bought a place in a new building with a high enough percentage of foreign owners, who give all their votes to a single proxy representative who lives in the building to vote on behalf of them all... what you and tenants who live in the building want... might not even matter a damn.

Could be UK law does not allow it to work like this... could be worse or better... not sure.

I studied construction & building materials at university. Reinforced concrete buildings don't normally flare up like this. In fact, one of the few reasons a high-rise building would even have any concrete in its structure (since steel frame is perfectly solid, strong, and far lighter) is to shield the steel from heat in the event of a fire.

It looks like this fire quickly propagated because of outside cladding that was put in place during recent renovations. It is impossible for any building material legally purchased & used in the UK to NOT be at least fire retardant (very slow to catch fire), if not pretty much impossible to burn.

Someone has caused this tragedy through criminal action, not even just negligence. Heads should roll.

ITV is just talking to a man who escaped from the 7th floor because he didn't stay put. He and his family left.

Cote, so are you saying the cladding was an illegal substance or that it couldn't be caused by the cladding because no cladding is available that burns like that?

This is devastating

It must be illegal - i.e. Not approved for use in construction.

No building material approved for sale in the UK would burn like that.

I think I read somewhere that it might be the gap between the cladding and the building that caused it, creating a space/funnel for the flames to rush upwards?

That is chilling Cote. So someone, somewhere has probably been cutting corners by purchasing cheap materials not approved for use in the U.K.? How utterly corrupt and unsurprising.

Apple - Flames always go upwards (obviously) regardless of whether there is space between materials.

The problem arises when the material is flammable. If it had not been, there would still be a fire but it would spread much more slowly, giving people time to escape and possibly even put it out.

Cote, I'd be interested to know what you make of this. The last few pages concern the cladding and access.

www.rbkc.gov.uk/idoxWAM/doc/Other-960664.pdf?extension=.pdf&id=960664&location=VOLUME2&contentType=application/pdf&pageCount=1

No building material approved for sale in the UK would burn like that.

Approved by who? Tested for compliance by who? Tested independently, randomly and often... or just tested once with a sample provided by the manufacturer?

Dad - There are official organizations that check such matters in every country. You need to ask those detailed questions to someone who practices in the UK.

Cote I really hope you're wrong, with all due respect, because I can't get my head round the thought that someone jeopardised the safety of a tower block of people to save a few quid.
A man on Sky news said it had started in a fridge. Again, I really hope that's not true because London Fire Brigade has been warning for years about those Beko fridges.
Lastly what about the smoke alarms? So many people said they were only woken up by shouting. Why didn't the smoke alarms go off?
This is so heartbreaking. As my teenage son said, " What's going on in this country? This has been an awful month."

If you are in London and want to help, apparently many of the residents have just their pyjamas. You can donate clothes, blankets, toys, toiletries here:

St Clements Church
95 Sirdar Rd
W11 4EQ

Koala - Thank you for that link. It proposes a zinc composite cladding, which should be non-combustible. But it clearly wasn't. So either the material was different than proposed, or corners were cut and it was not certified.

These renovations should also have been inspected. Why did the inspector not see that flammable material was being used?

I hope I'm wrong too, MissEliza, but I doubt it very much

Our council flats and houses were cladded years ago then it was rolled out to homeowners for free as an enviromental initiative they called it if this cladding is cheap rubbish it is really quite frightening.