Grenfell Tower fire- thread three

[RhythmAndStealth]

Seventeen tragic deaths confirmed so far, six victims provisionally identified.
Number of those who perished feared to rise into triple figures as search proceeds
Search for remaining victims expected to take weeks, sadly it’s considered unlikely that it will be possible to identify all the victims
Names of those still missing start to emerge
Nearly 80 victims being treated across six hospitals, with 15 still in critical care
Hundreds of people displaced and dispossessed, concerned about when and where they will be rehoused

Public inquiry ordered.
Criminal investigation launched.
Serious questions being asked about fire safety regulations, management of social housing, austerity and inequality.
Fire Brigade search of building expected to take weeks due to complexity of building, extent of fire damage and the necessity of undertaking a painstaking fingertip search.

“There must be arrests after this monstrous crime” David Lammy MP

‘Families rehoused last night been left clueless about where to spend next nights. No word from #kccouncil. Chaos.” Emily Maitlis, BBC

“We have to act as if it was our friends, our family in that block” Nick Hurd MP, Policing and Fire Minister

“Someone needs to be held accountable. These deaths could have been prevented.” Local resident to Sadiq Khan

Thread 2
Thread 1

What the government and local authority should have done is:

1. Put the survivors up in one hotel, immediately give them all a large sum of money to live on while housing and other issues are dealt with.
2. Sent in a team of specialist workers to be based in the hotel, working on behalf of the families and keeping them constantly informed and updated.
3. Putting large numbers of community workers on the streets of the local area to control the press, reassure and inform the local community , organise donations and tributes and show concern.
4. A large centre for those seeking information on missing people.
5. Adequate help for those evacuated from surrounding blocks.

I was in Manchester the week after the bombing. I was asked multiple times by community workers if I needed any help while in the city centre, simply because I was a civilian in the city centre a week after the bombing. The press were contained around the memorial site, and held back from the scene of the crime. People could grieve in peace and the public were constantly reassured by the presence of a team of officials trying to help them.

People around this tower block are being treated like a human zoo, from the moment helicopters started to film their deaths to right now.

There hasn't even been an announcement that the government is going to pay for the funerals. The government is behaving in an absolutely shocking way.

More info on how to help

The dreadful death of children has prompted the medical community to speak up too. I really hope that we are now at some kind of tipping point against tolerating austerity: see this statement on the fire by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. It's not at all the usual language used by the medical establishment and they are clearly angry- absolutely rightly.

Sorry I hope you don't mind me pasting it in I think it's very powerful:

Responding to the Grenfell Tower fire, Professor Neena Modi, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said:

“If, as Gandhi said, a nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members, then Britain is failing.

“This fire and the appalling loss of life is both a human and a societal tragedy. The gap between rich and poor not only in London, but across the UK, is stark. Our society appears increasingly to be defined by inequalities, in one of the richest countries in the world.

“Once again, emergency services, the local community, and the NHS have stepped up magnificently to help those in need, with many paediatricians treating children caught up in the fire. What they have witnessed will stay with them forever. It is right that there are demands for answers as to why this happened.

“It shouldn’t take a tragedy such as Grenfell to make politicians sit up and notice that inequity is growing in the UK, with an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, and children at most risk. Investment in public services, including education and health, and providing opportunity for all, must be a priority for any Government, not the continued imposition of a harsh austerity.”

I've been thinking quite a bit about this. EmilyBiscuit, in response to my earlier points about flame retardants, i.e. that they mostly don't work in sofas and therefore would have been killing people in the tower with toxic smoke sooner than they should have been, said this was irrelevant, adding:

"Flame retardants are designed to prevent small fires. Cigarette burns turning in to actual fires, for instance. But nobody of any competency would design a building on the basis that no significant fire would ever happen."

First, that's the point: they're designed to prevent fires (they claim big as well as small by the way, or at least they claim they significantly slow down the development from small to big) but they don't, at least they don't in sofas - as proved by the government itself.

Second, you keep making the point in different ways that all that matters are building regulations. I didn't say they didn't matter, nor that they aren't perhaps the most important factor here. But there are other factors, too, that won't have been taken into account necessarily. And while you can't take everything into account, you can and should take into account a potential risk that is common and preventable.

Third, I think this illustrates, at least for me, that one of the reasons that little tends to change after tragedies like this is because the understandable angry first reaction can force the authorities (or give them the excuse) to look for just one explanation/solution, instead of considering every ramification. The latter is important because usually outcomes result from a whole web of causes, involving for instance regulations and greedy/corrupt individuals. And when you only focus on one effect/cause/reason, the bad guys simply slide their machinations into another area that no one is looking at.

My area of knowledge is in consumer product fire safety. Someone else's may be in building regulations. The danger - as the bad guys know only too well - is that people can become too focussed on/possessive about their particular area and thereby not see how other areas have a part to play too.

For example, if the issue of sofas that are ignitable and toxic when they shouldn't be was taken up (as I am trying to in every way I can) it would expose the fact that the government has been sitting on the solution for three years and failing to act. Exposure of that could help in that the same processes or similar will almost certainly be happening in other areas too, like building regulations.

Well said. All of a sudden Corbyn's magic money tree, or in the real world, increased taxation of higher earners/increasing corporation tax doesn't seem as ridiculous as Amber Rudd made out. If you ever agreed with her that is.

Did anyone see the lawyer on Victoria Derbyshire i think it was, he was appealing for other lawyers to give up their time and help due to the cuts in legal aid the families aren't eligible. This is to give advice on employment and what they should be entitled to with regards to time off etc, helping with insurance claims, helping with claims if they weren't insured, helping with identity issues. That sort of thing.
Every cut to every service has further compounded this fire.

Social housing
Legal Aid
Fire service
Police
NHS

All wrapped up into one tragedy.

That is very powerful Prune, I hope you don't mind if I share it.

This article on the BBC is also good: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-40290158

Blog post by a gp at one of the rescue centres

originally featured in the Guardian

I think that sometimes empathy and witnessing someone’s grief are as important a part of our role as procedures or prescribing.

I am coming to the conclusion now that Kensington council don't have a clue who was living in Grenfell. There is no list.

This account from a volunteer at a rescue centre is illuminating Suit:

What's the situation on the ground?
by Kat Brown

Local resident Mary Attwood, a writer, art historian and teacher, had been volunteering at the scene, and described a lack of organisation from the council as “chaotic”.

“I was there for at least four or five hours but there was no central organisation,” she told GLAMOUR. “It was all, ‘Speak to that person, speak to that person’. The churches and charities were very good in contrast to the Council."

She described Latimer Road locals setting up dining and kitchen tables to take donations after nearby centres ran out of space following a massive social media campaign, with nobody from Kensington and Chelsea there to take charge.

“The firemen, police and ambulance service were phenomenal, and really helpful. But it’s just [the council] passing the buck. A resident on my road and a couple of others have offered a room and it was even hard to get that information across and to get them to write that down. "Oh, I'm not sure if we need that, or who's writing it down." I offered to write it down for them, but no. It was quite bizarre on the council's part.”

www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/grenfell-tower-fire

I agree, didn't know who was living there, didn't care who was living there.

Amount pledged by the Government to support those affected by Grenfell fire - £5m.

Amount pledged by the Government to refurbish Buckingham Palace - £369m.

I read an article on Thursday that said Theresa May's (lack of) response to this is like George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina.

But it's more than that, isn't it? This is our Hurricane Katrina. Where is the help? Where is the organisation? No one knows exactly who lived and died there

Is this going to blow wide open the issue of people living "off-grid", in poverty?

This is the thing I don't understand. The whole system which has created austerity, inequality, deregulation, under investment in the welfare state, that has been going on before our eyes, but the woeful council response - is just... I mean terrorism, security is one thing where May historically has directed her attention. Even within the constraints of the current system I would have expected the disaster recovery plan to have been better - as it was in Manchester

The council have an emergency plan, they have put it into action - I assume it's online somewhere. What is the in the sections about co-coordinating the civilian response, and press liaison?

As has been said before, this is a very rich area, in a city which has had numerous mass fatality events. The whole system around what has caused underinvestment in social housing, will require decades, investment and huge political will to change. But the disaster recovery plan? That should be better than this.

I don't know if its emblematic of other problems within the council, but it's not a money problem - they have the funds. Other councils with less money have done better.

Every council really should have a emergency disaster plan, I have no idea why this is going so wrong :(

Is this going to blow wide open the issue of people living "off-grid", in poverty?

It could HeyRoly. Good point.

MakingMerry I think part of the reason they have the funds is because they plan underspends, and part of the reason everything is so chaotic in an emergency is because they underspend. They've cut operations back past a functional level.

Much of the media seem to lead their story in the political issues

Very little about the victims and the impact on the community

Just about politics and the insurance bill

the times

I am in the library 📚

I think the chaos would be the same regardless of the poverty to be honest

NHS has just issued an update. 19 people are still be treated across 4 hospitals. 10 are in critical care.

I'm sure that's part of it, RhythmAndStealth, but even then, I would expect coordinating civilian response to be in the emergency plan - for it to be delivering, if poorly - this doesn't seem like it has even been considered.

Which given this is a rich area - lots of wealthy people, lots of tourists, lots of tourist attractions - is a failure, even within the terms of the current system.

During the Tory/Lib Dem coalition the government introduced the "Red Tape Challenge". It pledged to help the country (well, business mostly) get on with doing stuff without being restricted by pesky red tape. Now, this may be indicative of the Tories (more than the Lib Dems perhaps) but the first tranche of regulations to be put up for the axe contained a whole bunch of consumer safety laws including the two that I know about: the flammability of furniture and children's nightwear.

The aim was to put these regulations up on a website and if any one of them received 200 'No's from the public it would be axed. So they put them up and guess what? There were hardly any Nos; in fact most people said, "Don't we need safety regulations?" So they changed the rules and decided to axe them anyway.

For a year, the furniture/nightwear regs civil servants who at that time were trying to update them had to spend all their working time instead battling Cabinet Office officials and ministers who wanted to axe them. The decision was made, finally, to keep the furniture regulations but with the proviso that they be updated and improved (as said earlier, this has not happened mainly due to the chemical industry blocking changes, but that's another story). They also said they were no longer interested in axing the nightwear regulations. They didn't say why but just the day before the Mail had run an article about how a child star of Emmerdale had tragically died from burns when her skirt caught light on her grandmother's (unguarded) gas fire. In light of that, no minister wanted to announce he/she was axing laws that required children's clothing to be fire-resistant. On that point, hopefully a good thing that could come out of this tragedy is that ministers will be forced to act - at least in bringing in changes to make our sofas safe and non-toxic.

I have written a list of 'issues' (for want of a better word) surrounding this tragedy/scandal. I wrote it because it was all in my head and I deal with things by making lists. I am sharing it here in case anyone else is interested, needs it or has anything to add:

Issues

Regulations not changed after Lakanal fire and other tower block fires world wide. Reports and advice not acted on and continually delayed.

Tenants (Grenfell Action Group) continually not listened to. Worries not taken seriously.

Faulty fridge? Or possible power surge causing it to catch fire?

Cladding (Flammable materials used and Gap between cladding and building acted like chimney and cladding possibly attached to tower with wooden struts)

Fire Prevention measures (Fire breaks possibly removed or damaged and Cladding joined up the ‘separate’ flats)

Lack of sprinklers

Lack of a communal fire alarm system

Single staircase - only one escape route.

Smoke in staircase

Lack of emergency lighting(?)

Residents told to remain in flats (as fire shouldn't have spread)

Access for emergency services to block

No record of residents

Overcrowded housing

No emergency plan put in place by Council. No central information point. No coordinated rehousing effort. Offers of hosing being turned down by council(?). Relief effort organised and runs by volunteers- mosques and churches etc.

Council, government and Prime Minister not coming in person and helping and listening.

Deaths- number and individuals- being covered in a strange way by media. Minimising?

Need to rehouse residents locally

Other tower blocks across country potentially in danger - changes or rehousing is urgent

Need for quick answers to why this fire happened and a Need to act quickly on recommendations resulting from this.

Wider issues about Housing Associations, council spending/ priorities and the gap between the rich and the poor and racism.

Did anyone notice that TM did actually (sort of) answer a direct question in the EM interview? EM clearly rattled her at one point and she replied "No. ...blah blah blah". An actual no!! From TM!!!

Though TM did look rattled throughout the entire interview tbh, she is in way over her head now. EM did look quietly livid and (not intended as an insult!) as though she hasn't been sleeping too well. She was on the scene earlier in the week, wasn't she. It clearly affected her :(