In the shadow of Grenfell Tower- thread four

[RhythmAndStealth]

Rest in Peace

Isaac Shawo, 5
Khadija Saye, 24
Mohammed Alhalaji, 23

At least thirty people confirmed to have died

Six further deceased victims provisionally identified

Many more people feared to have died. They have yet to be reunited with their names

Nineteen people still in hospital, with ten in critical care

Many people homeless and dispossessed

Many bereaved

Many traumatised

“…it is difficult to escape a very sombre national mood.” The Queen.

Three investigations launched- Fire, Police and Public Inquiry
£5m Government Emergency Fund created
£3m donated by public
Peaceful protesters demand justice and answers.

Thread three (includes links to threads one and two)

In the new video released of inside one of the flats, it looks as though all the internal walls also burned away? No one has a cooker and washing machine in a middle of a room and an open plan bathroom - or is it just me?

The government hides a lot.

Unfortunately not IME HairyDilemma. I posted upthread about my experience of council flat living - IME it's fairly normal for the people in the flat to vary under the same lead tenant without the council knowing much about it at all. I'm not talking about full subletting, but friends, family composition changes, etc. I've copied it below - I think it maybe helps to explain the reason why they don't know, even if they have the right lead tenant info.

"I got my council flat on my own, then now DH moved in. Council never notified (council tax knew but they're not exactly joined up). If I'd had a child whilst living there the council wouldn't have directly known - medical services etc might have, but the housing element would have been uninvolved.

Similarly the house I lived in with my mum; it was originally me, her and older brother but only her on the tenancy. He moved out, I moved out, other brother moved in. Only mum recorded as tenancy

Other family flat; originally mum plus 2 kids, oldest kid has a child so there's 4 now. Then she moves out. Then back, this time with 2 kids. So they're up to 5. Then she moved out, back down to 2. Then son moves his girlfriend in. Then she gets pregnant. Through all of this, only mum is on the tenancy.

IME this is pretty much the norm. They will need to cross reference numerous sources to try and come up with a list of who lived there."

It does appear as if the internal walls did burn away. How did the washing machines and oven's survive the heat as well.

Thereallochnessmonster

"I was talking about the fire with dh last night. We can 't understand how the small fridge fire spread outside to the cladding so quickly. Can anyone shed light on that?"

Fire does spread very fast. See:

(Nothing explicit to watch, just a firefighter's demonstration.)

GhostPower Identifying suicide bombers is completely different - they usually identify themselves before the die through videos proclaiming support for ISIS. Some, are also already known to security services.

I thought that too Rino.

I said the same Rino, it was very obvious when you saw the bath that the walls surrounding it were completely gone. Looks like any non structural walls disintegrated.

Ghostpower, a bomb does not have the same impact as a fire. Go away and do some research about the impacts of both before posting conspiracy theory nonsense please.

Suicide bombers tend to only be blown into some pieces and then dont burn so much.

Rinoachicken In our block our internal walls were mostly "cardboard walls" - they aren't brick walls - although we had a couple of brick walls too. You can tell when you knock on them what the construction is - "cardboard walls" knock very hollow and don't hurt your hand, brick walls hurt and make a much quieter noise.

Apparently the term I am looking for is "stud" wall.

Apologies for the lack of clarity / my knowledge.

Statistically, thank you for that. Just shows what a nightmare job it is trying to get any sort of consensus on numbers.

The internal walls were wood and plasterboard. The walls between each flat are concrete and were supposed to prevent fire spread.

Stuart Cundy seems like a good egg. From his statement today I think the death toll will rise by quite a bit tomorrow, which is when they give their next statement. He sounded quite haunted when he said he didn't want to discuss numbers today.

I hope not :( but it doesn't seem very hopeful.

If I recall correctly, at the inquest into the Manchester bombing they stated that they identified the bomber using fingerprints, dental records and ID found close to the body. Of those methods only dental records will be of use for a victim of this fire, and that is reliant in them having been registered with a dentist in the area. I'm betting an awful lot of them won't have been.

11122aa that sounds suspiciously like the story a firefighter wrote on the facebook page Save the UK Fire Service. I won't look at the Mail but it sounds like they've lifted it as per usual without bothering to ask permission

I imagine the internal walls were Plasterboard Partition walls. Plasterboard (and plaster) are surprisingly fire resistant, but if you make them hot enough, for long enough, the water content boils out (absorbing heat as it does) and the plaster crumbles to dust.

Most likely the partitions would have given an hour's fire delay to protect adjacent rooms from fire.

It is generally considered that if you can isolate a fire into a single room for an hour, that gives time for the occupants to escape and the fire service to deal with the fire.

In this case, obviously not, but AFAIK it is not suggested that the partitions were the cause,

You can see why fire doors and partitions are so important, for example in protecting stairwells and escape routes in houses with loft conversions. I get very distressed when I see people boast that they have removed their firedoors for a lovely open-plan effect.

It does look like the internal walls are gone between the flats.

Having looked through some of the documents about the regeneration and seeing the building of the new flats there was a lot of wood separating them.

Flats were added during the regeneration of the building, so more than the 120 I've seen quoted, but the people doing the regeneration can't make up their minds how many - one, nine, ten - that's just from minutes I bothered to look at. They can't seem to decide if they have renumbered the flats and floors either (one set yes, but then a later set, no). A lot of mention of emergency services needing to know flat and floor numbers and them changing.

Lot of mention of new flats on the lower floors but none of how many and it's repeatedly reported about how flats and floors need renumbering - I'm sure that will be causing issues for services as well and probably explains why people are confused about which floor relatives were on or even flat numbers. That's from the kctmo minutes ( kctmo.org.uk then search for grenfell for all the minutes which are there).

Given they don't know how many flats there are(!), the council site is all over the place too, just how much more difficult does that make things for emergency services to do their job right now? How do you work out how many people are in a building where the number of flats has a question mark over it??

Stuart Cundy comes across as a very secure person to have in charge. Tomorrow does not sound promising.

It sounds like a very positive thing that people have been rallied round to take over from the council. They sound beyond incompetent in many regards.

That's what I feared. I now have horrific images in my head of poor people trying to do the whole 'shut yourself in a room and close the door use wet towels' thing hoping to buy themselves time to be rescued and it being totally pointless because the walls were going to catch fire.

My dad is a retired fireman and this has really traumatised him. He never had counselling for any of the things he saw over his decades as a fireman, it was never available. Now all
Coming back to haunt him. He's also so angry that this could happen.

(Ignore second paragraph, obviously it was some sort of wooden mould)

I think Cundy seems really decent too BertieBotts. Obviously it's only based on perception and gut feeling but I genuinely don't see him being involved in the sort of conspiracy theories being pedalled - and he would have to be involved.

I think he;s just very methodical and meticulous and won't say anything without being as sure as he can be.

I'm wondering if yesterday's announcement caused a whole bunch of people to come out of the woodwork - maybe people who were assumed to have been reported by someone else, or weren't reported because folk thought the council knew they were there, or similar.

Yesterday there was a report, or several reports, that a small group of illegal immigrants had been sleeping rough since the tower had burnt down; they were taken by a member of the public to a rest centre

Did anyone else read this?

I hate the term illegal immigrants, I need to come up with a better term i feel comfortable using

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

Becca, I think the plans were originally for an extra 7 (4 of them 4 beds, the rest 3), but then I found a newsletter where they announced that the nine new flats were almost complete. I can't find a planning change to reflect it though...