Photo: Brandon Butterworth under CC4.0
Between 2004 and 2014 these rates fell precipitously by 40%.
As a society, we’ve become better at identifying and mitigating risks – not just fire risks but those related to road safety, theme parks, consumer goods and many other areas. Indeed, so zealous have we apparently become that the populist right-wing press has regularly railed against the ‘nanny state’ and ‘health and safety gone mad‘.
The contrast with the somewhat more laissez-faire approach of the 1980s is staggering.
Just consider that smoking was permitted in train carriages until 1984 and on London underground platforms until 1987, with a trial ban made permanent following the Kings Cross fire that killed 31 people and injured 100.
Or the circumstances surrounding the fire that killed 56 football supporters at Bradford City’s Valley Parade stadium in 1985. The stand that caught fire was made of timber at a time when supporters were allowed to smoke freely on the terraces.
Crazier still, litter had been allowed to pile up beneath the stand – a ready-made bonfire awaiting ignition. A copy of the Bradford Telegraph and Argus was found after the blaze that was dated 4 November 1968.
Such tragedies prompted the government to take the safety of its citizens more seriously and firefighters attended fewer and fewer fires as the years passed.
With fire apparently a receding threat, a government committed to slashing the deficit saw the fire service as an obvious target for cuts. The firefighter’s role was also expanded to encompass traffic accidents, terror attacks and major floods.
We might have been full of post-Empire, pre-Brexit anxieties about our economic status and cultural identity, but we were good at keeping people safe. While hundreds of workers have died in the construction of facilities for the Qatar World Cup, not a single fatality was recorded in the building of London 2012 venues.
When a series of fires broke out in Dubai skyscrapers, many in the UK might have sneered at the emirate’s complacency over fire standards.
And yet, despite their frequency, not a single person died in the high-rise Dubai blazes. By horrific contrast, the death toll from the Grenfell blaze, though still not finalised, will surely represent the worst loss of life in a single UK fire in living memory.
We are, as a nation, somewhat more humble about our fire safety record than we were before 14 June 2017. If the UK government forgot about the Lakanal disaster all too readily, it will be harder to expunge this one from the collective memory.
The harrowing stories of people throwing children out of windows on upper-level floors are not easily forgotten. And the charred remains of Grenfell Tower, visible from miles around, stand as a lasting monument to the complacency, incompetence and disregard of so many involved in the protection and management of social housing.
But if others had been surprised that such a thing could happen in 2017 Britain, those in the fire industry were less so. Many voices in the fire industry had been warning, with increasing exasperation, for years about the multiple fire safety deficiencies of high-rise residential blocks.
More than a month on from the worst fire disaster in living memory, the shortcomings and instances of neglect continue to mount, dispelling any lingering complacency after decades of falling numbers of fire deaths.
The Grenfell fire has brought into sharp focus the materials favoured by the modern construction industry. As the scale of the cladding problem continues to worsen, fire-engineering experts are now warning that timber frames, which are the most popular building method for social housing, are also problematic.
Speaking to the Guardian, Arnold Tarling, a chartered surveyor, said: “I worry it will take more losses of life before people take this seriously, because nobody ever learns. With buildings like this, everything has to be perfect with the build to make them safe, and then afterwards,” he said. “At the moment we’ve got a lot of modern materials, and a lot of materials being put together, and the regulations just haven’t kept up.”
The structural issues that once necessitated a 7-8 storey limit on the height of timber-frame buildings are no longer an issue thanks to innovations in construction methods. One timber-frame building planned for construction in east London will have nine floors, while a proposal for a 300-metre-high wood-framed skyscraper.
The US, where timber frames are widespread, specifies height and area restrictions and mandates the installation of sprinklers systems – neither of which apply in the UK.
Timber frames can be perfectly safe. The problem arises when corners are cut, resulting in gaps in the timber frame, which is encased into a sealed void between external bricks and internal plasterboard walls.
Jim Glockling, technical director of the Fire Protection Association, told the Guardian: “We shouldn’t be scaremongering. A properly put-together timber-frame building should perform well but it’s about having the methods and quality assurance in place. There’s a difference between what you are allowed to do through building regulations and what you should do.”
Residents themselves can undermine the effectiveness of compartmentalisation by drilling holes in a wall to mount shelves or a TV.
The problems of timber frames extends beyond the theoretical. One blaze caused by a discarded cigarette at flats in Hounslow, west London, destroyed 16 homes and caused the collapse of the building roof. And a Manchester block of flats was demolished six days after a fire broke out so fire crews could be certain it was fully extinguished.
It has also emerged that 25 Grenfell Tower residents had experienced electricity power that caused appliances to malfunction, overheat and even emit smoke. Based on documents it had obtained, the BBC reported that some of the problems, reported several years before, had still not been resolved in the months leading up to the fire.
The Grenfell fire is believed to have started when a fridge freezer caught fire on the fourth floor.
Given the rapid spread of the fire up the building’s exterior, it was immediately apparent that the cladding on Grenfell Tower was woefully inadequate from a fire protection perspective. Worse still, in the days and weeks that followed, government tests revealed that cladding from a huge proportion of high rise residential buildings was similarly deficient.
The latest damaging revelation comes from University of Leeds, the BBC has reported. A team of researchers has found that burning cladding on Grenfell Tower would have released 14 times more heat than government tests allow. Although contractors who fitted the cladding insist that it passed all regulations, the researchers concluded that the cladding’s plastic core would have burned “as quickly as petrol”.
According to data released by French authorities, e cladding would have released 43.2 MJ/kg of heat. The European A2 standard for “limited combustibility” is 3 MJ/kg. The foam insulation underneath the cladding was, separately, thought to emit around 26 MJ/kg of heat.
Download the Fire Safety in 2023 eBook, keeping you up to date with the biggest news and prosecution stories from around the industry. Chapters include important updates such as the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 and an overview of the new British Standard for the digital management of fire safety information.
Plus, we explore the growing risks of lithium-ion battery fires and hear from experts in disability evacuation and social housing.
