London tower block fire

Horrific scenes on TV this morning from the Grenfell tower fire in London. I'd be amazed if the death toll doesn't reach well into three figures.

It seems likely that recently fitted cladding was combustible & could have allowed flames to spread from floor to floor.

Stories on Radio 5 of residents being threatened for raising safety concerns & the former chair of the residents association being threatened & rebuffed continually, again for raising safety concerns.

It seems health & safety regs that the rest of us have to adhere so strictly may have by-passed London councils

There will be lots of suits who's asses are making buttons now & rightly so.

Looks awful.

Death toll up to 12. Bound to rise significantly over the coming days. Horrendous.

awful know he was rubbish for us but great to see Morgan organising something to help raise money.

Footballer Marvin Morgan is staging a celebrity football match tomorrow as he bids to raise £10,000 for victims of the Grenfell Tower fire.

Former Aldershot, Shrewsbury and Plymouth striker Morgan has enlisted the help of his friends from the game and beyond to put on the charity match in Hertford
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Saw on the news the fire resistant panels cost £24 per panel , the ones they stuck on £22.
makes you sick that all those lifes were not worth and extra £2

There ll be riots later this summer

Heads will certainly be rolling over the tragic fire in London and also over the cladding issues up and down the country.

How come people in London get evacuated due to the wrong cladding installed on those blocks (seen as an urgent threat) , but not in Plymouth and elsewhere for that matter. Do PCC not have the resources ?.

I think Camden Council did the correct thing, but they could and should have addressed the matter much sooner.

What manufacturer would consider making flammable/ combustible panels to clad any building?

Who would consider purchasing or fitting flammable/ combustible panels to any building?

There is something fundamentally at fault when architects, project managers, contractors and manufacturers all get this simple thing so wrong.

seadog wrote:

What manufacturer would consider making flammable/ combustible panels to clad any building?

Who would consider purchasing or fitting flammable/ combustible panels to any building?

There is something fundamentally at fault when architects, project managers, contractors and manufacturers all get this simple thing so wrong.

On the BBC interactive red button (CEEFAX to those of us of a certain age), the cladding was changed for a cheaper aluminium cladding and a "less fire resistant" product than the original proposed, saving £300,000.

Kensington and Chelsae Council said safety was not compromised council.

Scandalous.

seadog wrote:

What manufacturer would consider making flammable/ combustible panels to clad any building?

Who would consider purchasing or fitting flammable/ combustible panels to any building?

There is something fundamentally at fault when architects, project managers, contractors and manufacturers all get this simple thing so wrong.

Is driven by cost cutting and nothing else, it's the same in the Rail industry, bloody criminal what's going on.
Watching TV this morning, Kensington Council still don't get it, HTF they haven't invited Grenfel representative's to attend their meeting is beyond me, the lot of them should be removed from office PDQ.

This horrific tragedy, or something like it, was waiting to happen. For too many years we have have been fed the lie that the "market will provide". Well this is what "the market" delivers. The market has no conscience and will cut every corner it can to reduce costs and increase profit. In fact this is so de rigeur it is actually written in to company law.

And companies don't even need to do anything other than acquire land and buildings to make a profit. They can buy property and leave it empty which ramps up demand on the properties they do let and makes them more profitable. And land is at such a shortage that the obvious response is to go high and the higher the better so you can cram even more people into your base square footage. So high that ladders can't reach the top and can water be squirted to reach.

It's not just that though. Cutting red tape has been all the rage and the only good quango is a bonfired quango. Councils? Do less with more. Employ fewer people and make efficiency savings. That means fewer buildings inspectors, less stringent scrutiny of planning and the near certainty that any decision they make to turn a planning application down will be reversed on appeal so it is almost an automated rubber stamping process. And as if that isn't enough never let the chance to ridicule and undermine elf 'n' safety culture pass.

But the poor souls who were burned were only working class and mostly on the poor end of the income bracket and so they don't need sprinklers unlike those rather wealthier people who might stay in a highrise hotel where sprinklers are fitted as standard everywhere. What can we deduce from that other than that poor people are disposable and wealthier ones are not and that some people are more equal than others?

And when it does all go wrong we have fewer policemen, firemen, nurses and hospital beds than we might have to deal with it because we have to do less with more.

You can't even say "nobody saw it coming" because the residents' association did see it coming and repeatedly warned that Grenfell House was a disaster waiting to happen but if this had not happened then something else would have eventually: a train crash or a collapsing bridge or a huge flood or some other unimaginable horror because the mindset that has led to these deaths is the same as the mindset throughout our country in every last sphere of operation.

God help us.

This country is becoming akin to a third world country, just can't believe what's unfolding and I'm frankly fed up with hearing the platitudes from the politicians " our thoughts are with them" " our brave heroic emergency services", etc etc, well yes they undoubtedly are heroic but when they call for additional resources that falls on deaf ears.
We should take the "Great" out of Great Britain, because we're far from that and I cannot see there's any inspirational leadership of any political persuasion that's going to get us out of it.

A disaster like this simply does not happen in modern, western cities where regulations exist for good reason and are applied; they do happen in half-arsed corrupt cities where building regs are viewed as an option and there's nobody to check up that they are applied if they exist at all.

I coined a word for this some time ago: Bangladeshification.

Well here it is writ large. Life is cheap. Who cares that 100 or so people died an awful death when there's plenty more where they came from?

Burn the quangoes on a bonfire! Cut the red tape! Unleash the entrepreneur! End this elf 'n' safety madness! Self-regulate! Deregulate!

And just think this has happened with the dead hand of Brussels bureaucracy insisting on all sorts of rules enforced by the might of a supra-national European Court and we're leaping headlong into scrapping all that jive as fast as we can.

It won't be long before Bangladesh is laughing at us.

God help us.

Can't believe a disgusting capitalist government allowed deadly cladding in the three Plymouth tower blocks in 2000, day of rage and justice needed now! Oh, hang on it was a Labour government, god help us.

Any truth that the fire brigade attended put the fire out then noticed the upper floor ablaze ????

Elias wrote:

Any truth that the fire brigade attended put the fire out then noticed the upper floor ablaze ????

As I understood it, the FB were called to the Fridge fire which they put out, job done and on their way out of the building when another crew were coming in following reports of an external fire

I see subletters will avoid conviction too..........

Sounds like there might be another "Hillsborough" thing going on here in the background, where some interests want to blame the residents who died or the fire service who tried to save them. Could get very nasty indeed.

In 40 years we ll know the 'truth' when those responsible have passed leaving a scapegoat for slaughter

I see some hospitals were being checked recently and there were is

LINK