zip accident wrote:The fire authority got it wrong that night.
Did they?
Their recommendation, in ordinary circumstances, against the recorded design of the building, would have been correct.
But, unbeknownst to them, these were not ordinary circumstances, as the building had been fatally altered from its original design, by cladding the building in an inadequate flammable material.
There are many buildings in London. The fire service cannot be expected to magically know, upon arrival, what alterations have been made to them all. They go by the design that's recorded for the building - because what else can they reasonably go on?
At the time, which is the true criminal act here, no-one had performed adequate fire safety tests on this material that they then clad an entire building in. Legally, that should never have happened. Equivalent to releasing a new drug without having tested it first. The product should never have been out there "in the wild" when its fire safety status was not known.
And the point is that Grenfell was far from the only building clad in this cheap-and-cheerful illegal material. There were many other tower blocks, around the country, found to be clad in similar or equally inadequate material.
This was very much a case of "there, but for the grace of God, go I". Many other tower blocks could have potentially been the first to go up, instead of Grenfell.
This was a systemic error. An untested cladding material, by definition, fails building regulations. So how the hell did such cladding end up on not just Grenfell, but many tower blocks all over the country?
Why was this allowed to happen? Why was this not recorded for the fire service to be aware of these alterations? Who the hell authorised this? Whose responsibility would it be to enforce the building regulations that should have made it impossible to clad a building in an untested - and, thus, illegal - material?
To blame the victims for being dead is clearly ridiculous - as if they consciously chose to die.
But to further blame the first service - who risk their lives and run TOWARDS fire, instead of away, to do their level best to stop people dying and being injured - for not having the full information, as someone has been flouting building regulations on the cheap, to compromise the fire safety that the building was designed and built to, and were keeping this dodgy information to themselves so they didn't get found out?
This is, in my view, equally stupid.
Do you have a magical crystal ball? How do you know that if the advice had been to evacuate the building that less people would have died?
There's a reason for the standard advice. Having everyone simultaneously descend down through a fire, whilst very likely being deeply panicked and, at the level of the fire, likely being completely blinded because of the smoke is not a magical solution either.
I don't know about Jacob Rees-Mogg, but I was part of a youth group as a child that went to our local fire station.
They showed us their training facilities. It's a small tower that they fill with furniture, set on fire and then practice their skills. To demonstrate to us just how blinding smoke can be, they turned off the lights and it was pitch black. Being a bit of a "class clown", I'd mentally noted where the mattress was and I have quite good spatial orientation, so I climbed onto the mattress while the lights were off and, when they turned them back on, I was just lying there. Nonetheless, though I made a bit of comedy out of it to get a few laughs, I 100% understood the point they were making.
I was prepared, because he'd pre-warned us that the lights were going off, so that no-one came to an injury. So it gave me time to mentally note where the mattress was in relation to me. And I was standing next to it. If those lights had gone out without warning and my aim was to get out of the door, then I would not have been able to pull that off.
We all hear it but it's quite true - it's the smoke, rather than the fire, which kills most people. Because thick smoke completely blinds you. And, of course, it chokes you (and, lacking oxygen, you'll start getting the symptoms of hypoxia. Which includes confusion, fatigue, dizziness and other things that are going to massively impair your ability to get the hell out of there).
Do we know - for a fact - that asking all the residents to descend simultaneously through a fire would have resulted in less death?
Or is that just a random speculation that you feel is "common sense"?
Is there a belief here that, in such extreme circumstances, this is all down to the fire service and, had they got their advice right, there would have been zero deaths and everything would have been lovely and wonderful?
What I'm getting at is this bizarre modern idea that everything that goes wrong is someone's fault. An asteroid smacks into the planet at 3am tonight, wipes out North America. Who's fault is that?
"Where there's blame, there's a claim".
It's not reality, but a dumb legal / political thing where dumping blame on someone allows you to extract compensation, or it's a good way to distract people from asking "wait a minute, why was untested cladding material allowed to be put on all these tower blocks, in clear violation of building regulations, in the first place? Who's in charge of enforcing building regulations?".
(And this relates to Brexit, in that what they really mean by "take back control" is to have "a bonfire of the regulations" for more of this dodgy shit to happen, as they simply value the "high score" in their bank accounts over the preservation of human life. Brexiteers complain about the laws made in Brussels. But ask them to specifically name which ones they mean. And, of course, ignore the silly "straight bananas" thing because it was never true, as your own eyes can confirm for the last 40 years where you've never once been unable to purchase a curvy banana at your local store. They're not saying it, but the laws that offend them are food standards, building regulations, workers' rights, etc. as these get in the way of "robber baron" capitalism at its finest.)
This has also been cited as the root psychological cause for conspiracy theories. The idea that there has to be "an agent" behind things going wrong, and it can't just be random chance. A belief that "everything happens for a reason" - often, but not always, a religious idea that the gods have a "plan" - so when bad things happen, it must be because - I don't know - "God brought the floods because he hates gays" or "the government - who are ordinarily too incompetent to tie up their shoelaces - have masterminded some elaborate conspiracy for the last 50 years, involving millions of people, whilst never once having a single whistleblower or leak".
I'm not absolving anyone of their role in the fire. But, equally, do we really believe that there was a particular set of circumstances - a certain bit of advice that the fire service could have given - which would have magically ensured absolutely zero deaths? Is that a remotely reasonable idea?
There was a fire raging out of control. Smoke inhalation could very possibly have already killed numerous residents before the fire service was even informed, much less got there. Starved of oxygen, hypoxia sets in within minutes and it leads to unconsciousness, before death.
(Speaking of oxygen, we must also take "blow back" into consideration. If you open a door to a room where fire is raging, but there's no smoke or fire where you are, then you're in an environment of high oxygen, creating a path to an environment of low oxygen. Diffusion. An oxygen-rich "breeze" can flood into the fire-filled room and, riding the oyxgen, come back into your face with explosive force. That one's a killer that's taken out many a fire fighter, I'm afraid. And so running through a burning building, opening all the doors, ain't necessarily the smartest idea.)
If you think this shit is at all simple or obvious, then I'm afraid you're making exactly the same offensively insulting mistake as JRM.
And I'm worried that dumping blame on the fire service - a senior politician advising people to DEFY the advice of the fire service - is going to, in some other situation, get people unnecessarily killed.
Heat rises. Thus, it carries smoke upwards. Asking people to descend down through blinding, choking smoke is absolutely NOT without serious issues and immense risks.
If the building hadn't been criminally altered - without any of the authorities picking this up and forcing them to remove the cladding - then their advice would have been entirely correct.
The fire service doesn't just make this shit up as they go along. There is precedent. There have been fires where evacuations have ended up killing more people than those who stayed put - the tower blocks are explicitly designed for this.
The trouble with "common sense" is that it's often completely and utterly wrong.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
