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High rise fire?????

There are 120 apartments in the building, which was constructed in 1974.
 
On google streetview, it looks like there has been construction ongoing around the base of the building and on the exterior. It also looks a bit rundown.
 
“A disaster waiting to happen,” is how the architect and fire expert Sam Webb describes hundreds of tower blocks across the UK, after the fire at Grenfell Tower in Kensington which has left at least six people dead. “We are still wrapping postwar high-rise buildings in highly flammable materials and leaving them without sprinkler systems installed, then being surprised when they burn down.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...g-to-happen-fire-expert-slams-uk-tower-blocks
 
http://www.constructionenquirer.com/2017/06/15/grenfell-tower-fire-probe-focuses-on-cladding/

A key area of investigation will be the common rainscreen system used on the Grenfell Tower, which is designed to include fire-breaks at every floor and around every window.
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The building was overclad with with Aluminium Composite Material cassette rainscreen. This consists of two thin aluminium sheets sandwiching a core material. The panels are available with polyethylene or less flamable mineral cores.
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The cladding system employs a void behind the panel to vent moisture. An intumescent strip is designed to be installed at regular intervals to expand in the event of fire to become a cavity barrier.
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Cladding contractor Harley Curtain Wall fell into administration shortly after completing the £2.6m Grenfell Tower project.
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We are allowing the same thing, plastic insulation and rainscreens, after the problems with sealed-up buildings I started looking into rainscreens as the solution but there was no way I could see to firestop the rainscreens short of stopping the ventilation that you are installing them to achieve.

The Guardian said:
The inquest concluded that years of botched renovations had removed fire-stopping material between flats and communal corridors, allowing a blaze to spread, and that the problem was not picked up in safety inspections carried out by Southwark council. The council was investigated over possible corporate manslaughter charges, but eventually fined £570,000 under fire safety laws.

Arnold Tarling, a chartered surveyor at Hindwoods and a fire safety expert, says the elephant in the room is the flammability of insulation panels that are being used to clad postwar buildings to bring them up to date with today’s thermal standards. A recent £8.7m refurbishment of Grenfell Tower saw the building clad with “ACM cassette rainscreen” panels, an aluminium composite material covering insulation panels, which could have caused the fire to spread more quickly up the facade of the tower.

“The issue is that, under building regulations, only the surface of the cladding has to be fire-proofed to class 0, which is about surface spread,” says Tarling. “The stuff behind it doesn’t, and it’s this which has burned.” He says he recently inspected a new-build eight storey block in south-east London where there was no fire protection in the external cavity walls. “The insulation behind the external cladding is flammable polyurethane. I know because I took a chunk out and burned it.”

“We have been very concerned about the introduction of highly combustible products into buildings,” he says. “They are often being introduced on the back of the sustainability agenda, but it’s sometimes being done recklessly without due consideration to the consequences. It’s not uncommon for buildings to have blocks of polystyrene up to 30cm deep on the outside, which is an extraordinary quantity of combustible material to be sticking on to a building. There are often ventilation voids between the rainscreen cladding and the insulation to prevent damp, but this also increases the spread of flames.”¹
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I don't know about the British system but this is apparently government housing for the poor, so Southwalk Council is apparently the owner and inspector, nobody went to jail in the prior fire.


¹ https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...expert-slams-uk-tower-blocks?CMP=share_btn_fb
 
The ICC-ES Evaluation Report for Reynobond FR and PE MCM panels can be found here:
http://www.arconic.com/aap/north_america/pdf/certifications/icc-es_fr_report.pdf

It limits the PE panel to 40' tall buildings with exceptions and references IBC 1407.11.1.

The articles I read have stated that the PE panel was used, not the FR panel

Also behind the MCM panel was a 150mm Celotex FR5000 panel. These can be seen charred all over the façade that remains.
 
Daily Caller said:
London’s Grenfell Tower was made worse by government “green energy requirements” that allowed fire to rapidly engulf the building Wednesday, leaving at least 17 people dead and scores more wounded or missing.

While it’s unknown what sparked the fire, experts say that the cladding, or exterior insulation, created a chimney effect through which the fire rapidly spread upwards. The cladding was added to Grenfell’s exterior in 2015 as part of a $12.8 million retrofit.

“I have never seen a fire that has engulfed an entire building like this in a career of more than 30 years,” Matt Wrack, who heads the Fire Brigades Union, told The Telegraph.

“It could be that this is the quest for sustainability trumping other concerns,” echoed Dr. Jim Glockling of the Fire Protection Association.

“There has been an emerging body of evidence surrounding some of the materials being used and now we have an appalling demonstration of what can happen,” Glockling said.

The Telegraph noted that cladding “is used as an insulation to make buildings more sustainable to meet green energy requirements.” Some 30,000 buildings in the U.K. have been retrofitted with cladding to cheaply comply with green energy mandates.

Grenfell Tower became more energy efficient, but the space between the cladding and the building increased the potential damage from fires, leaving hundreds of residents at the fire’s mercy.

“There were explosions everywhere you looked, lots of bangs, blue gas coming out everywhere you looked,” Mickey Paramasivan told The Telegraph.

“About 12 floors up I saw three children waving from a window and then there was just an explosion and they disappeared,” he said. “They were three kids, they were banging on the windows, you could see their silhouettes and then bang, it just went up.”

Prime Minister Theresa May has called for a full investigation into what happened. Others have called for all cladded buildings to be inspected for fire hazards.

However, building residents and experts have warned about the fire risks of cladding for years. A blog post by the Grenfell Action Group in November 2016 warned that “only a catastrophic event” would bring attention to the building’s issue.

Government officials cautioned against the risks of cladding since at least 1999, according to The Telegraph.¹
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If the building had not been retrofitted for energy efficiency this would not have happened.


¹ http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/15/deadly-london-tower-fire-fueled-by-green-energy-rules/
 
416869EB00000578-4602442-image-m-5_1497427893757.jpg
 
Read that the BBC interviewed someone saying the building just had new gas lines installed...and ran the lines up the stairwell. Any lack of attention to the penetrations would turn that exit stair into a stovepipe.

...and highly flammable rainscreen, this is criminally awful
 
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-40293035
Why don't all high-rises have sprinklers?
BBC News
A sprinkler system is one of the most effective tools available to prevent the spread of fire in tall buildings. Grenfell Tower and thousands of others in the UK do not have sprinklers installed. Reality Check explores the reasons.
Regulations in England mean that only buildings constructed since 2007 and which are taller than 30m are required to have sprinklers fitted. This requirement wasn't applied retroactively so did not apply to Grenfell Tower, which was built in 1974.
Existing high-rises in England must have them fitted if a fundamental change is made to the structure or use of the building.
These regulations are the same in Northern Ireland. In Scotland all new residential buildings taller than 18m must be fitted with sprinklers. In Wales since last year, all new and refurbished residential accommodation must have sprinklers. Nowhere in the UK is it a requirement to retroactively fit sprinklers in existing buildings.
Martha Kearney, Presenter, The World At One, BBC Radio 4
This tragedy has brought back memories of other fires in high-rise blocks and warnings ignored. The World at One has looked into what recommendations were made in the past.
After a fire at Shirley Towers, Southampton, in 2010, which killed two firefighters, the coroner said: "Social housing providers should be encouraged to consider the retrofitting of sprinklers in all existing high-rise buildings in excess of 30 metres in height."
In 2005, a fire at Harrow Court in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, killed a woman and two firefighters trying to rescue her. The Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service report recommended the UK Fire Service should explore options for high-rise buildings, including the "provision of sprinklers".
After six people died at Lakanal House in south London in 2009, the coroner said "It is recommended that [the Department for Communities and Local Government] encourage providers of housing in high-rise residential buildings containing multiple domestic premises to consider the retrofitting of sprinkler systems."
How expensive?
Fewer than 1% of council tower blocks are fitted with sprinklers - so what does it cost to fit a new sprinkler system in an old building?
Sir Ken Knight, the author of a report on the Lakanal House fire, said that while there was significant evidence of the effectiveness of systems such as sprinklers controlling fire spread in buildings, it was not considered "practical or economically viable" to enforce the retrospective fitting of fire suppression systems to all current high-rise residential buildings.
The British Automatic Fire Sprinkler Association (BAFSA), the trade body for the fire sprinkler industry, said retrofitting Grenfell Tower with sprinklers might have cost £200,000. This is the figure for installing a sprinkler system but does not include potential maintenance fees or costs associated with the wider redevelopment of a building.
Costing will of course vary from building to building. After the Shirley Towers fire in 2010, it cost the council £1m to install sprinklers in three tower blocks.
The cost can be high because in blocks made of concrete and steel like Grenfell, the process is difficult and time-consuming. So the focus has been on other measures which would contain a fire to stop it spreading.
However, Roy Wilsher, chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council, said it is "certainly something we need to look at again".
He also said that if the fire spread up the outside of a high-rise, as it is reported to have done at Grenfell Tower, then sprinklers might not have made a difference The Grenfell fire was similar to one that broke out in Dubai in 2016 - the difference is "that building had sprinklers and nobody was killed", according to Alan Brinson of the European Fire Sprinkler Network.
In 2015, a spokesman for the Chief Fire Officers Association said that nobody had ever died in a fire in the UK in a property with a "properly installed sprinkler system working the way it's meant to".
 
Risk of high-rise fire deaths in U.S. has dropped
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...hs-in-u-s-has-dropped/?utm_term=.f64e520da3e4
The horrors of the deadly high-rise fire in London happen every year in this country, according to a report on high-rise fires, but the risks are only a fraction of what they were decades ago.
An average of 40 people die and 520 are injured every year in high-rise building fires, mostly apartments, according to the November report from the National Fire Protection Association.
If you live in a high rise and want to know your own risk, Robert Solomon has a simple answer for you. Does it have a modern automatic sprinkler system? If so, you should be safe.
“We have a really good track record with our high-rise buildings in the last 20 to 25 years,” said Solomon, head of the Building and Life Safety Codes division at NFPA.
[London high-rise apartment fire death toll rising]
The first requirements for apartment-building sprinklers went into effect in the mid-1970s. Over time, the rules enforced better systems. Now any death in a building with a sprinkler is “so rare” that it gets special review, he said.
“We probably have zero fatalities in a high-rise building in the U.S. that’s protected with an automatic sprinkler system,” he said. “It’s zero or approaching zero.”
But that doesn’t mean everyone is safe. Older high-rise apartments often lack sprinklers.
Early reports from witnesses at the London fire indicated that there were no sprinklers and that alarms may not have sounded.
Almost 60 percent of fires in U.S. high-rise apartments occur in buildings that do not have automatic sprinklers, according to the NFPA report on fires in high-rise buildings seven stories or higher. The report looked at fires from 2009 through 2013. But that rate compared favorably to low-rise apartments, where 85 percent of fires happened in buildings without automatic sprinklers.
Almost all fires in both high-rise and low-rise apartments were in buildings that had smoke detectors or alarms.
The good news for high-rise apartments, hotels, dormitories, offices or medical facilities is that stricter rules for sprinklers, building materials and alarms mean that fires there are much more likely to be contained to just one room or one floor. The report said just 4 percent of high-rise apartment fires spread from room to room, and only 2 percent spread to another floor. The share of fires spreading to more rooms or other floors in low-rise apartments is more than twice as high. Similarly, high-rise hotels and offices had fewer fires spreading across rooms and floors than low-rise buildings did.
2300fire-protection-1024x592.jpg

Improved safety has not been uniform across the country. Rates of death in fire are about twice the national average in a cluster of southern states: Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, South Carolina, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Tennessee. The District of Columbia is almost 50 percent higher than the national average. New York, New Jersey and most of New England have below-average rates, as do Florida and most of the states on the West Coast where a greater proportion of the housing is newer. Maryland and Virginia are both very close to the national average of about 1 person out of 100,000 dying from fire each year.
2300map-fire-death-rates-1024x828.jpg

risk-of-high-rise-fire-deaths-in-u-s-has-dropped

"That’s not just some random thing,” Solomon said of the regional differences. “When we look at some of those southern states, the fire loss data in general for high-rise or single-family homes, those rates are going to tend to be higher.”
Activists in London complained that the safety standards for the building were low because the tenants were lower income. Solomon said that poverty could be a factor in the higher fire rates in the southern United States. Black children and seniors have greater risk of dying in fires, according to a 2010 NFPA report that gathered together various demographic studies of fire risk, but that risk evens out in wealthier areas.
The disparity in fire rates in the south could potentially come from weaker enforcement of fire codes, according to Solomon, as well as poorer quality housing. However, resistance to retrofitting older buildings with better fire protection, he said, happens in expensive developments as much as in affordable housing.
 
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cda said:
Performance based ?
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The reasoning for 2 is in case one becomes inaccessible due to fire. This causes a significant challenge for a performance based solution in that how do you provide the level of service of a second exit without actually providing it? Reduction in number of exits required due to occupancy or travel distance is typically done using a timed egress study, but I've never seen one attempted for a single exit.
 
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