Grenfell Tower

[scottish]

Anyone following the Grenfell tower story?   Holy s**t.  70 dead, from a small refrigerator fire.   Apparently the building, which is 43 years old, was reclad about 5 years ago as the concrete exterior was deteriorating.   It sounds like they used aluminum cladding with flammable insulation, so the fire spread rapidly through the outside of the structure.   To make matters worse, the owners - some form of city government - had a history of ignoring complaints from residents about safety hazards in the building.

The UK government is scrambling to identify other buildings which have been reclad with the same material.

[okits]

I have been following.  The negligence and mismanagement identified so far have been horrifying.  No smoke detectors.  Instructions to stay in one's unit.  The parents in the higher floors who chose to drop their children out the windows, hoping someone below would catch them, must have been desperate beyond description.  I hope all those dropped kids survived, and am so sad for the ones who died in the fire (as well as for the adults who perished).

[FIRE Artist]

it is horrifying. I always have to seek out the stories of triumph in these cases - the baby dropped from the 10th floor, successfully caught by a man on the ground. The woman who saved herself, child and boyfriend by having the presence of mind in the midst of chaos, to flood her bathroom.

[Polaria]

I've been following that as well, since I left the UK not even one year ago and it's still dear to my heart. That kind of stuff shouldn't have happened in the UK in 2017.

Is saving 2£ per square meter of cladding by using flammable (and likely forbidden) cladding instead of the inflammable version worth the death of 70-something people? I don't think so.

The cladding was used to soften the eyesore created by that tower on the way richer surrounding areas. Now they can look at a blackened tomb (as a comment I read so eloquently said).

This highlights the (very large) dark side of London anf the chasm between rich and poor there.

Tangent to that and worth reading:
https://cookingonabootstrap.com/2017/06/18/a-firefighter-who-was-called-to-grenfell-wrote-this-after-his-shift-and-even-as-an-ex-fire-control-op-i-found-it-extremely-difficult-to-read/

[respond2u]

60 high rises checked, 60 high rises failed.
4 evacuated. (from skynews via roku earlier today)

[joonifloofeefloo]

Yes.

I posted elsewhere:

...I was offered a cheap govt place last fall...
I declined, as you guys advised, over multiple concerns.
One was fire exit.
I was astonished and so sad that they would put people in unsafe places that don't meet code just because they are low-income.
I think that's not okay.

I'm somewhat flexy:
I'll live us in an RV, a bachelor suite, an apartment block, a basement suite...
But I draw the line at, "We literally would be unable to escape a fire starting anywhere in this entire house." The fact that most tenants in the place I was offered smoked various substances indoors only increased the risk.

England is now deciding that poor people deserve to escape fires too.
I'm relieved.
I'm crushed, of course, about what it took for England to decide this.

[UnleashHell]

Can't afford sprinklers. can afford one billion to NI to prop up this failing government. Disgraceful.

[Cali Nonya]

Slight on-topic slightly off-topic, I'm following Arconic's role in this.  That cladding is not allowed on buildings over 33ft in the US since it is a known fire-hazard.  It brings up the question of corporations selling items that are known hazards in countries that still allow them to.

[sokoloff]

Slight on-topic slightly off-topic, I'm following Arconic's role in this.  That cladding is not allowed on buildings over 33ft in the US since it is a known fire-hazard.  It brings up the question of corporations selling items that are known hazards in countries that still allow them to.

Is it legal to use on buildings under 10 meters? Then why should its sale in country be a surprise or be banned? It's the inappropriate use that's the issue, not the product's presence in country.

[Bracken_Joy]

Slight on-topic slightly off-topic, I'm following Arconic's role in this.  That cladding is not allowed on buildings over 33ft in the US since it is a known fire-hazard.  It brings up the question of corporations selling items that are known hazards in countries that still allow them to.

Whoah. Didn't know it was a US company. Thanks for pointing that out.

[Cali Nonya]

No the cladding that was used IS legal in the UK.  It's banned in the US for building over 10m (greater than a fireman's ladder).  I forget where, but there's a good article out in this.  The US requires "real-life" installations be tested and the cladding does not pass.  The UK does not require the testing that the cladding fails, so it can legally be sold for the application it was used for there.

There are many examples across a lot of products and industries where a practice or item is banned in one country and legal in another. 

[Cali Nonya]

Arconic just spun off from Alcoa last year.  I had been following the company anyways since I had stock from a while back in Aloca, therefore I  received the spin off stock for Arconic.  There was a proxy vote (just last month) to oust the president of Arconic who came from Alcoa, so Arconic has been in the financial news a bit if you follow base metals.

For me it's weird since Alcoa was famous in industrial circles for having some of the best safety standards back at around 2000. 

[Sockigal]

Building materials seem to have become more flammable over the years, not just for big buildings, but for individual homes. I had been looking at new homes and researching the building materials a couple of years back. The plywood, lightweight materials and engineered lumber that most new homes are built with today contain toxins that leach into the indoor air for years and are highly flammable. Homes built today burn at a much faster rate than homes of the past. Engineered support beams burn in 5 minutes, while those built with real wood take 20-25 minutes to burn. I'm not a conspiracy theory follower, or anything, but the Koch Brothers are big investors in wood and paper industries. I sometimes think the lack of regulations in building materials allowing the use of wood pulp in food products and engineered lumber (which is basically wood pulp glued together with highly flammable resin) is a direct result of the Koch brothers political affiliations. Please don't hate on me! Just my very humble opinion and something I had been concerned about for years.

[Mississippi Mudstache]

I sometimes think the lack of regulations in building materials allowing the use of wood pulp in food products and engineered lumber (which is basically wood pulp glued together with highly flammable resin) is a direct result of the Koch brothers political affiliations. Please don't hate on me! Just my very humble opinion and something I had been concerned about for years.

I work as a forest/wood products industry analyst. Though I have no love for the Koch brothers' business practices and political meddling, there's really no need for conspiracy theories to explain the industry's increasing preference for engineered wood products: It's about money, and not just the money that's pouring into the Koch brother's pockets. Almost everyone* in the supply chain, from mill owners to homeowners, benefit financially from engineered wood products. They have a much lower raw material cost than solid wood products. You can use small, poorly formed trees (wood that would normally go to a paper mill) and sawmill waste to make products that surpass solid wood products in strength, stability, and consistency. Wood products manufacturers pass these savings on to builders, who save additional money in reduced labor costs and pass those savings on to consumers. The result is that building costs are lower, wood utilization is higher (i.e., less wood going to waste), and buildings are safer today than they were in previous generations. As you note, off-gassing of volatile adhesives and fire safety highlight the fact that there is still work to be done, but don't take that as evidence that we haven't made significant strides in building safety over the last 100 years.

*It can be argued that forest owners are the losers with respect to engineered wood products; higher utilization of the wood that is harvested, combined with shifting preferences to cheaper wood sources, reduce overall demand for wood and drive down timber prices. Basically what's happened over the last 20 years or so is that the price of the lowest echelon of timber - pulpwood - is propped up by the increased demand, while saw log prices have been suppressed, reducing the spread between the highest and lowest prices than landowners are paid for their timber. It has probably been a net negative effect for land owners.

[RetiredAt63]

*It can be argued that forest owners are the losers with respect to engineered wood products; higher utilization of the wood that is harvested, combined with shifting preferences to cheaper wood sources, reduce overall demand for wood and drive down timber prices. Basically what's happened over the last 20 years or so is that the price of the lowest echelon of timber - pulpwood - is propped up by the increased demand, while saw log prices have been suppressed, reducing the spread between the highest and lowest prices than landowners are paid for their timber. It has probably been a net negative effect for land owners.

I wonder about ecosystem effects as well.  A lot of that would have been left over and returned to the forest ecosystem.  Those nutrients are lost, that carbon that could have been humic acids is gone, that brush cover for wildlife is gone.

[ncornilsen]

*It can be argued that forest owners are the losers with respect to engineered wood products; higher utilization of the wood that is harvested, combined with shifting preferences to cheaper wood sources, reduce overall demand for wood and drive down timber prices. Basically what's happened over the last 20 years or so is that the price of the lowest echelon of timber - pulpwood - is propped up by the increased demand, while saw log prices have been suppressed, reducing the spread between the highest and lowest prices than landowners are paid for their timber. It has probably been a net negative effect for land owners.

I wonder about ecosystem effects as well.  A lot of that would have been left over and returned to the forest ecosystem.  Those nutrients are lost, that carbon that could have been humic acids is gone, that brush cover for wildlife is gone.

When they fall the trees and grind up the limbs, there's plenty left behind.  They stuff they're making engineered wood from would have been burned in an incinerator or turned into paper. (incidentally, a mill I used to work at burned thier tailings and sold power to the grid. It made so much more money that they would actually shut down the mill to sell extra power to the utility at times of peak demand)

As for the toxic gases... wood naturally contains formaldahyde. Some glues used to contain a bit more of it, but no longer. From what I understand, the offgassing increases short term in plywoods/EWPs since the chipping/peeling process increases the surface area to volume ratio, causing a period of high offgassing, versus a more typical drawn out period of minimal offgassing in natural wood.

Also, at least in Oregon, gross mismanagement of timber resources have locked up good, renewable sources of wood suitable for use as solid wood members, so there's no choice but to increase the use of EWPs.

[Mississippi Mudstache]

*It can be argued that forest owners are the losers with respect to engineered wood products; higher utilization of the wood that is harvested, combined with shifting preferences to cheaper wood sources, reduce overall demand for wood and drive down timber prices. Basically what's happened over the last 20 years or so is that the price of the lowest echelon of timber - pulpwood - is propped up by the increased demand, while saw log prices have been suppressed, reducing the spread between the highest and lowest prices than landowners are paid for their timber. It has probably been a net negative effect for land owners.

I wonder about ecosystem effects as well.  A lot of that would have been left over and returned to the forest ecosystem.  Those nutrients are lost, that carbon that could have been humic acids is gone, that brush cover for wildlife is gone.

Of course logging has tremendous negative impacts on natural ecosystems. So do farms, homes, shopping malls, hospitals, warfare, and every other vestige of humanity. But the effect of logging in an area where there is demand for engineered wood vs. the effect of logging where there is no demand for engineered wood is indiscernible. As ncornislen mentioned, we're not taking more wood out of the forest than we used to - it's just that more of the wood is going to make structural wood products rather than pulp/paper and electricity.