Like nobody could see this coming:
The inquiry into the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in London has revealed how the styrofoam thermal insulation layer in newly-fitted wall cladding enabled a small domestic fire to rapidly engulf most of the building, resulting in the loss of 72 lives.
The type of cladding installed complied with advice given to local authorities in 2010 by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) to reduce emissions through installing new boilers and insulation in apartment blocks.
Read the details. Anyone with the slightest bit of business experience could have foretold a tragedy like this. But because Gummint was involved…
Anyone who’s ever taken a match to a piece of styrofoam could have predicted this. Why not save water by filling the boilers with gasoline, too?
The thing is… the cladding they used wasn’t compliant to fire codes by any stretch of the imagination. They bought from a low bidder who foisted flammable cladding on them. The government weasels are trying to pretend it was “okay but not quite suitable” when it was really just dangerous.
Even before Grenfell went up in flames, multiple tall buildings with similar cladding had caught fire in various countries – and others have since.
This issue of insulation reminds me of a book by Gregg Olsen, “The Deep Dark”.
These buiding officials, engineers and architects need to be put in harnesses that are “okay but not quite suitable” and pushed off of a ledge for bungee jumping or perhaps given equipment for sky diving with the same rating “okay but not quite suitable.”
I remember when this happened. One of the speculations was that the fire was caused by some new type of fridge that used propane as a coolant rather than some ozone destroying CFC type chemical. Many news stories about fridges blowing up for now reason. Since the apartment building was going for all the “green”, maybe the domestic fire was caused by another greenie innovation.
If the multi-family building was 3 stories or more fire suppression sprinklers were required. That is the rule here in the US. I did not read up on this and never heard of the incident until now.
If you eliminate all materials that might be flammable not much building will be done. Even 2 layers of Type X drywall installed to UL specifications will burn if say, a jet flies into it.