I agree. It was a noble attitude to have during WW2, but nowadays it is used to supress reactions to failures, neglect, and policies that benefit a select few while condemning vast groups of people to a life of misery.
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Massive Fire in High Rise Apartment in London
- Thread starter superdeluxe
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I agree. It was a noble attitude to have during WW2, but nowadays it is used to supress reactions to failures, neglect, and policies that benefit a select few while condemning vast groups of people to a life of misery.
JonnyDBrit
Member
I imagine her presumption was 'Let the council handle it, let the council handle it...'
Then today and realised, "Oh, I need to do something."
mehrmantrout
Member
I've just got back from a days volunteering and it's absolute chaos there, no local council or govt to be seen, as far as I could tell it's all locals/volunteers doing everything and they're massively out of there depth
Makes you wonder how long she'll stick around as PM.
CelticKnight
Member
So May basically thought that if she went down there waving a cheque for £5m they wouldn't shout at her?
Jesus wept, woman. She's a walking PR disaster.
Jesus wept, woman. She's a walking PR disaster.
Herr Schwarz
Banned
5 million lol. Jam it up her asshole after overturning her car. Theresa May fucking hates the general public, she resents the general public can even vote.
That'd be another great PR image, Theresa Mays police force gunning down protesters as she speeds away
Frames what the future is gonna look like perfectly.
That'd be another great PR image, Theresa Mays police force gunning down protesters as she speeds away
Frames what the future is gonna look like perfectly.
It should be a thoroughly organised government-led operation. There's clearly no plan in place to respond to the aftermath of these types of tragic events. It's disgusting and another lesson that needs to be learned from this tragedy.
It reminds me of the response in the US to Hurricane Katrina, when the government basically turned their back - well it wasn't New York eh. And you know damn well that if it was a swanky block of luxury apartments the response from the government would be different. It's heartbreaking and makes me so angry.
Single staircase? Or scissor stairs?
Single staircase has been illegal in the USA for over a century.
I dislike the automatic assumption that greed or money is at the heart of this. The old saying 'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" seems to apply here.
I worked for a while in a law firm that worked in insurance, and handled plenty of home insurance claims, including a lot of house fires and apartment fires. The amount of engineering mistakes and oversights you'd come across in the loss adjuster's reports were astonishing. Often times the cheaper option would have been better... it was a lack of knowledge / experience / proper thought rather than greed. Sometimes it was down to a shoddy job, but almost always due to laziness in installation rather than cost cutting.
Worst case was the builder who worked his whole life to be able to afford to build his own home, finally built it, and three weeks later the whole thing burned down because he'd installed the wrong airflow system underneath the chimney. His three children very barely avoided death. Even when it's your own life, your own kids at stake mistakes can be made.
All I'm getting at here is that I highly doubt any of the people involved here thought "Yeah this cladding is a fucking flammable deathtrap, but fuck it let's pocket the five grand it would cost to use the better stuff and if people burn alive so what?" I just can't see a scenario where this was anything other than a terrible, terrible error of planning/oversight.
Now, if you want to start talking about the defeat of general fire safety legislation or deregulation or whatnot then I am 100% on board.
I worked for a while in a law firm that worked in insurance, and handled plenty of home insurance claims, including a lot of house fires and apartment fires. The amount of engineering mistakes and oversights you'd come across in the loss adjuster's reports were astonishing. Often times the cheaper option would have been better... it was a lack of knowledge / experience / proper thought rather than greed. Sometimes it was down to a shoddy job, but almost always due to laziness in installation rather than cost cutting.
Worst case was the builder who worked his whole life to be able to afford to build his own home, finally built it, and three weeks later the whole thing burned down because he'd installed the wrong airflow system underneath the chimney. His three children very barely avoided death. Even when it's your own life, your own kids at stake mistakes can be made.
All I'm getting at here is that I highly doubt any of the people involved here thought "Yeah this cladding is a fucking flammable deathtrap, but fuck it let's pocket the five grand it would cost to use the better stuff and if people burn alive so what?" I just can't see a scenario where this was anything other than a terrible, terrible error of planning/oversight.
Now, if you want to start talking about the defeat of general fire safety legislation or deregulation or whatnot then I am 100% on board.
holygeesus
Banned
2016. The plans can be seen in this tweet, showing the schematics
https://twitter.com/catherinehwyatt/status/874923070200393728/
It was a Huffington Post report that commented on the gas line. Basically it seems it ran all the way up it, obviously feeding individual flats, but the insanity is, of course, if it lights then you are blocking literally the only way out of the building.
To me it's the cladding/gas-pipe combo that made this such a devastatingly quick spread, and both were completely avoidable. A combination of catastrophic errors.
Single staircase.
Since the Triangle building fire I believe? But yeah, these buildings were not particularly well built in the first place
JonnyDBrit
Member
The fact that there isn't simply an online database, or any other kind of centralised hub for people to check in and know if loved ones have been found, are still missing, or dead, based on information from hospitals or calls in, is shocking.
Edit: Or to put it another way, the government should have a better handle on this situation than the likes of Facebook
Miles Quaritch
Member
And it's all coming to the NHS!
Herr Schwarz
Banned
I think the difference lies between ignorance, and willful ignorance.
This sure as fuck wasn't an act of God. There are no accidents in this kind of shit. Especially when you frame it against letters of complaint saying this place is a fire hazard, that then got suppressed.
TheOnlyOneHeEverFeared
Member
Fucks sake. The BBC describing it as a great demonstration of community spirit. What the fuck are the council/local authority doing?
It's amazing how that is legal. Seriously wtf is wrong with building codes when only 1 exit is required.
First world country
One of the world's biggest economy
Alpha ++ city
And they can't do shit for one unexpected, localised disaster affecting a (relatively) small amount of people.
If anything good can come of this, I really hope it's people realising how much we're rotting from the inside thanks to our government's insidious policies.
Sorry, I was talking solely from the perspective of the building company who installed the cladding, I should have made that clear. I hadn't been considering the council's actions. But the council avoiding the fire safety complaints is indeed outrageous and someone will have to pay for that.
Have they not brought soldiers over to support? That would seem like the obvious thing to do. After all it was only a few weeks ago that we had them patrolling our cities following the tragic event in Manchester.
Guess there is a money tree after all.
always crazy bacon
Banned
Brace for impact then.
Followed by government saying the need to control social media.
ferrasvansen
Member
5th richest country in the world, well and truly a country for the few, very few.
TheOnlyOneHeEverFeared
Member
Bringing soldiers in to move supplies is the next step... don't know how May had the gall to show her face down there.
JonnyDBrit
Member
...Some of the photos just shown on the BBC of the piping left me stunned. There was no covering on them at all.
s_mirage
Member
I can't disagree there. The only thing I can assume the logic is based on is that if the fire can't spread, why would there need to be more than one stairwell? Time and time again this thinking seems to go on with regards to safety systems: "why do we need redundancy to cover eventualities that can't happen?" Then they happen.
THE:MILKMAN
Member
Commander Jameson
Member
Do we know if those gas pipes were placed there when the building was built or recently? If recently, then couldn't they have added water pipes for sprinklers at the same time?
THE:MILKMAN
Member
I'm pretty sure the reporter on the BBC report said they had been moved to the above public areas as part of the renovation?
ferrasvansen
Member
A shocker in a series of shockers.
That's horrendous those pipes should never be exposed like that, especially pipes with gas in them.
frankie_baby
Member
They're recent
Commander Jameson
Member
That's what I thought he said. That's incredible that they could do that, but not bother with water pipes whilst they were doing the same work.
always crazy bacon
Banned
Construction standards in 1974 are very different to now.
holygeesus
Banned
I believe they had water-pipes that the fire brigade could tap into, but not a sprinkler system, so useless in this situation.
Also the fire-doors were built using softwood which offers no resistance to fire compared to a properly constructed fire-door which can resist for quite some time (hours?)
TheOnlyOneHeEverFeared
Member
Theresa May on sky talking about 'learning lessons' and avoiding the questions about cuts and improving health & safety, fuck.
What a fucking deathtrap. People should get long prison sentences for this.A shocker in a series of shockers.
THE:MILKMAN
Member
To give the exact wording he said:
Why this was done and they were deemed safe to be left in that state I can't fathom.
A shocker in a series of shockers.
There must a gas safe registered engineer around here that can comment on if that's deemed to be safe or not.
JonnyDBrit
Member
Well, they were apparently promised that they would insulated with foam or some such, but as time went on, the work was just never done.
Edit: Also I must admit, the BBC countdown thing instead being shots of a mural and people's views of the situation was, in an odd way, touching. Dwelling on the people, not the husk of the building.
Yeah but the US and Canada already have regulations requiring more then 1 exit, there's a reason we do because things like this have already happened. Stuff like this makes me so angry, such an easy thing to prevent but no one cares enough until it's too late.
I can guarantee that in a matrix that size that there were frequent and multiple gas leaks - probably dozens of small theoretically harmless or unnoticeable ones.
My dad lived in London and worked on air conditioning installation and had horror stories about quality of installation.
I have never ever seen something like this. And I've been/lived in buildings much older than 1975.A shocker in a series of shockers.
Wrestlemania
Banned
Yeah thatll help calm things down. The army.
People have a lot of respect for the Army and the organisation and man power they'd bring sounds like it would be welcomed. They're not going to be patrolling the streets with guns out.
There's such a thing as a harmless gas leak? I've always thought that any kind of gas leak is deadly.
holygeesus
Banned
May getting destroyed on the BBC right now. Tough questions.
frankie_baby
Member
The gas itself is harmless but if it ignitee then no its not
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