The Grenfell Tower Fire

[Liquid]

The company responsible for the tower renovation (and the renovation of other towers whose cladding has failed safety checks) has gone bankrupt, a common trick for companies wishing to avoid large fiscal damages.

Are they legitimately bankrupt or is it a pathetic attempt to not pay out?

If it is the latter case, surely it would be a formality to prove that the company is not bankrupt?

 

[TenEightyOne]

Are they legitimately bankrupt or is it a pathetic attempt to not pay out?

If it is the latter case, surely it would be a formality to prove that the company is not bankrupt?

I have no idea. As soon as I heard they were bankrupt I took a very cynical view - that probably won't surprise you. If assets have been shifted and value has been lost in order to achieve bankruptcy and that was all done in the UK then the paper trail should be easy. However, the literal fact is that a bankruptcy is a bankruptcy, if it's been approved by a court then it's legitimate. If it hasn't then it doesn't exist. Plenty of companies have bankrupted to avoid liability in the past but I have no idea of what the precedents are for bringing their pre-bankruptcy assets/balances into redress arrangements.

You don't need to be a corporate-specialist QC to see that the whole thing stinks but you'd probably need to be one to get to the bottom of it.

 

[Johnnypenso]

If the regulations are adequate then no, the fault doesn't lie in the nature of the written regulations.

Didn't say it did.

Agreed. The company responsible for the tower renovation (and the renovation of other towers whose cladding has failed safety checks) has gone bankrupt, a common trick for companies wishing to avoid large fiscal damages. The only cases that can now stand are against the individuals in any proven decision chain.

4 out of 5 businesses don't make it past 5 years according to some statistics. Businesses can and do fail for a variety of reasons so let's not put the cart before the horse. And if the safety checks were failed, it would be up to the the bureaucrats to enforce the regulations would it not? Again, it gets back to how the material got used in the first place, how the job was spec'd out and where were the inspectors and city engineers during the building process? That's the whole point of the acquiring building permits and submitting plans, to have someone that represents the people conducting the checks and balances to keep us safe. If that process is in place and working without corruption, the cladding never should have went up to begin with. If it did, an inspection should have halted construction until it was removed and replaced with the proper fire rated cladding.

 

[Dotini]

I have no idea. As soon as I heard they were bankrupt I took a very cynical view - that probably won't surprise you. If assets have been shifted and value has been lost in order to achieve bankruptcy and that was all done in the UK then the paper trail should be easy. However, the literal fact is that a bankruptcy is a bankruptcy, if it's been approved by a court then it's legitimate. If it hasn't then it doesn't exist. Plenty of companies have bankrupted to avoid liability in the past but I have no idea of what the precedents are for bringing their pre-bankruptcy assets/balances into redress arrangements.

You don't need to be a corporate-specialist QC to see that the whole thing stinks but you'd probably need to be one to get to the bottom of it.

At the end of the day, the liability falls upon the ones who have the money. Ultimately, that'll be you, the taxpayer.

If I'm reading the NYT correctly, the fault lies with virtually all of you. It's your collective ethos with respect to advanced cost-cutting before elementary safety. Both parties, the regulators, the commercial interests, the building or council managers and everyone who was involved, including the fridge makers, not just the foolish builders who put holes in the buildings and added the funeral pyre cladding. You don't need a corporate socialist QC, but a National Psychoanalyst Royal. It looks like these high-rise torches may be spotted all over the realm.

 

[TenEightyOne]

If I'm reading the NYT correctly, the fault lies with virtually all of you. It's your collective ethos with respect to advanced cost-cutting before elementary safety.

It's nearly 20 years ago that a fire in some external cladding of a building in Scotland (a separate country from England in rule of law) led to more stringent regulation. You can see that the recommendations for legislation are present in the regulatory document that I've linked a couple of times in this discussion.

4 out of 5 businesses don't make it past 5 years according to some statistics. Businesses can and do fail for a variety of reasons so let's not put the cart before the horse.

Absolutely. There's also an established history of British businesses going bust to specifically avoid liability.

Again, it gets back to how the material got used in the first place, how the job was spec'd out and where were the inspectors and city engineers during the building process? That's the whole point of the acquiring building permits and submitting plans, to have someone that represents the people conducting the checks and balances to keep us safe.

That's how it should be but in private tender there's a presumption that reputable companies will act legally. Something needs to change to ensure that they are doing so.

 

[MUSC4EVER]

75 buildings have now failed the cladding Government test, none of the buildings tested so far have passed.

What a disgrace that is....

 

[Touring Mars]

I don't wish to sound too flippant here, but who knew that using flammable cladding on high-rise flats was a bad idea?

I mean, I'm not an architect or an expert in modern construction methods etc. in any way, but even I can see the potential danger of wrapping a high-rise building in a flammable material, especially when there are flame-resistant alternatives available. Again, I don't mean to sound too flippant here, but did everyone involved in the re-cladding of this building collectively think 'it'll be fine so long as no-one sets fire to it'?.

 

[Famine]

Again, I don't mean to sound too flippant here, but did everyone involved in the re-cladding of this building collectively think 'it'll be fine so long as no-one sets fire to it'?.

Almost certainly - or they thought that the outsides might melt but the insides would be okay. The sprinkler systems would take care of it, after all.

 

[Lizard]

Why was this cladding put up in the first place?

 

[TenEightyOne]

Again, I don't mean to sound too flippant here, but did everyone involved in the re-cladding of this building collectively think 'it'll be fine so long as no-one sets fire to it'?.

Somebody somewhere must have thought that - in my opinion criminally so. The regulations are clear: cladding has to resist fire for 60 minutes, more than long enough for an apartment fire to be extinguished. From what various firefighters have said they responded in a timely fashion to extinguish the fire at the back of the fridge. By that time the cladding was already alight. Somebody has made a serious failing in the supply chain. We know that Camden specified regulation-standard materials and there's no reason to suspect that Kensington would have done otherwise. I think there was a rip-off going on in the hope (as ever) that nobody would notice.

 

[Robin]

Why was this cladding put up in the first place?

Make the building prettier and add some insulation. Unfortunately the Brutalist architecture of the 70's has not aged well at all, cladding makes them look like they were built yesterday.

 

[Lizard]

Make the building prettier and add some insulation. Unfortunately the Brutalist architecture of the 70's has not aged well at all, cladding makes them look like they were built yesterday.

So they made the place a fire risk just to make it look nice?

Great.

 

[Famine]

Why was this cladding put up in the first place?

Part of a gentrification process. I believe that the insides were done too in many instances.

So they made the place a fire risk just to make it look nice?

Great.

Not really. Had the cladding been the right, legal kind it would have been made to look nice without being a fire risk.

 

[Johnnypenso]

That's how it should be but in private tender there's a presumption that reputable companies will act legally. Something needs to change to ensure that they are doing so.

There's an inspection process I've alluded to several times already. During construction the professionally trained building inspectors employed by the relevant municipality are supposed to ensure things are being done according to the relevant by-laws and regulations. Engineers employed by the city are also supposed to ensure that the proper materials are spec'd out and used in the process. Maybe over on the other side of the pond they just wing it when it comes to putting up new buildings or doing huge renovations but over here you can't turn a screw or hammer a nail without someone looking over your shoulder and citing a regulation.

 

[TenEightyOne]

Engineers employed by the city are also supposed to ensure that the proper materials are spec'd out and used in the process. Maybe over on the other side of the pond they just wing it when it comes to putting up new buildings or doing huge renovations but over here you can't turn a screw or hammer a nail without someone looking over your shoulder and citing a regulation.

I'd question how many people would know just by looking at the cladding that it was 60 minute retardant or that it wasn't. Clearly somebody in the chain has intentionally said that the cladding was suitable, time will tell what their reasons were for that or how it happened. Building sites are not equipped for materials-standard testing and nor are they expected to be, I'm astonished that they are in Canada to be honest.

There are also some questions over the "new" test criteria for cladding:

The shadow housing secretary, John Healey, told the House of Commons that “cladding is not the whole story”.

“The government is fundamentally flawed in its use of the BRE to conduct overly simplistic and limited fire test samples and not the complete cladding assembly,” said Stephen Mackenzie, a fire risk consultant. “The small scale tests on external panels need to to be extended to a full disassembly.”

He said he had observed the removal of panels in three locations, including in Camden, and said he was worried that “we could be pulling off cladding systems that are potentially OK”.

Tens of thousands of people are facing uncertainty over whether they will be able to stay in their homes and hundreds have already been evacuated from the Chalcots estate towers in north London.

Barry Turner, director of technical policy at Local Authority Building Control, which represents council building control officers also asked: “I would like to know just what tests these panels are failing.”

“For any material to undergo a fire test as laid down in BS476 [which grades fire resistance] or one of the EU equivalent standards, you need a specific panel size, it needs to be mounted in a specific way,” he said. “There are fire tests done on individual products, but you need to test them combined [including insulation, cavity and fire stops] to see if they meet performance criteria for the job as a whole. That is how these systems are assessed for compliance with the building regulations.”

One architect responsible for some of the projects where cladding has been ruled to have failed, asked: “What are they testing to what standard? This could be a massively costly and disruptive error to thousands of residents.”

On the Chalcots estate, the assembly is said to have been designed with the approval of building control and has been tested in two real fires, the latest in 2012, in which the fire did not spread beyond a single flat. This could have been because of the way the panels were combined with non-combustible mineral fibre insulation, fire breaks. Cutting off and testing a piece of the aluminium cladding would not tell the government’s testers anything about that wider context.

In Bootle, where two blocks had their cladding removed, the housing provider One Vision said: “Test results have shown certain elements of the cladding on two of our high-rise blocks, Cygnet House and Wren House, whilst meeting building regulations, does not meet the latest Department for Communities & Local Government test criteria.”

Source. This implies that control officers are well aware of the regulations, their duties and correct procedures for testing.

 

[Lizard]

Not really. Had the cladding been the right, legal kind it would have been made to look nice without being a fire risk.

So why wasn't it?

(Sorry for my lack of knowledge)

 

[Dennisch]

So why wasn't it?

(Sorry for my lack of knowledge)

Because someone somewhere decided to be a cheapskate and said **** the rules.

 

[Famine]

So why wasn't it?

(Sorry for my lack of knowledge)

At the moment, that's the £50.3m question. The fact that this cladding - which doesn't seem to meet build regulation standards - has been found on at least 70 other tower blocks across the UK so far indicates that several contractors were using it. They may have been under the false impression that it was okay, or they may have been using it knowing that it wasn't. For now, nobody's really sure.

 

[Danoff]

There's an inspection process I've alluded to several times already. During construction the professionally trained building inspectors employed by the relevant municipality are supposed to ensure things are being done according to the relevant by-laws and regulations. Engineers employed by the city are also supposed to ensure that the proper materials are spec'd out and used in the process. Maybe over on the other side of the pond they just wing it when it comes to putting up new buildings or doing huge renovations but over here you can't turn a screw or hammer a nail without someone looking over your shoulder and citing a regulation.

Based on my very limited experience with watching my house being built and the various county inspection processes that ensued... I think you could get away with it here. You might have to fake some things, possibly even a label here and there on materials, but you could sub out certain materials without folks knowing.

Everything is supplied by contractors who got it from contractors who got it from contractors. If one of them substituted a material that looks the same but costs less, stamped it with the right markings, and sent it off for use... everyone down the line (including the building inspectors) would check it off as meeting code. Eventually, when something goes horribly wrong, the paperwork gets traced back and the person who fraudulently represented the material will get fined, lose their business, and/or go to jail. But there is not enough time or money to go through and stress test every I-beam and light a sample of every piece of siding on fire and watch it till it burns.

At some point, you have to trust that people will do the right thing (and by that I mean not intentionally mislead everyone) for at least self-preservation.

 

[Johnnypenso]

Based on my very limited experience with watching my house being built and the various county inspection processes that ensued... I think you could get away with it. You might have to fake some things, possibly even a label here and there on materials, but you could sub out certain materials without folks knowing.

Everything is supplied by contractors who got it from contractors who got it from contractors. If one of them substituted a material that looks the same but costs less, stamped it with the right markings, and sent it off for use... everyone down the line (including the building inspectors) would check it off as meeting code. Eventually, when something goes horribly wrong, the paperwork gets traced back and the person who fraudulently represented the material will get fined, lose their business, and/or go to jail. But there is not enough time or money to go through and stress test every I-beam and light a sample of every piece of siding on fire and watch it till it burns.

At some point, you have to trust that people will do the right thing (and by that I mean not intentionally mislead everyone) if not for any other reason than self-preservation.

Of course and that would be outright fraud. In that case the blame would lie with whomever altered the material so it appeared to pass inspection.

 

[Danoff]

Of course and that would be outright fraud. In that case the blame would lie with whomever altered the material so it appeared to pass inspection.

Judging from what I've read in this thread (I haven't read any articles on this event) I think that may have been the case here.

 

[Robin]

Thing is this wasn't some sus cheap brand of cladding. It was made by Saint Gobain (a name you have probably seen on car windscreen glass) and you would think a serious company like that would make something that meets the standards it claims to meet.

 

[Johnnypenso]

Thing is this wasn't some sus cheap brand of cladding. It was made by Saint Gobain (a name you have probably seen on car windscreen glass) and you would think a serious company like that would make something that meets the standards it claims to meet.

It meets the standards for building that are only a couple of floors high. Not every material is designed to be used everywhere and likely, if you dig into their technical papers you'd find the specifications and testing that point you in that direction. However, it's not up to them to determine who uses the material and where, that's the job of the contractors and the people who tendered out the work. There are tens of thousands of sets of regulations and the manufacturer simply makes the product, they don't install it or decide whether it's acceptable or not in a given situation. That's assuming of course that it was manufactured according to their stated specifications and shortcuts weren't taken during the production process that altered it's fire rating.

 

[Danoff]

Thing is this wasn't some sus cheap brand of cladding. It was made by Saint Gobain (a name you have probably seen on car windscreen glass) and you would think a serious company like that would make something that meets the standards it claims to meet.

That just suggests that the weak link was possibly not at that spot. This is pure speculation, but suppose for a moment, that some fantastic company made a bunch of construction materials. A contractor buys one of them, but pretends that it's a different one. That way they can skimp on costs.

I'm interested to know, when the dust settles, what really happened.

Edit:

Normally I don't like to go the route of assuming bad intentions. I'd rather say this was just an honest error and a bunch of missed checks. However, based on what I know of the construction industry, the contractors and inspectors are very careful about making sure the part codes line up. Oh sure, they'll drywall over an outlet or put a door in the middle of a wall, but the part codes lined up.

 

[Robin]

It meets the standards for building that are only a couple of floors high. Not every material is designed to be used everywhere and likely, if you dig into their technical papers you'd find the specifications and testing that point you in that direction. However, it's not up to them to determine who uses the material and where, that's the job of the contractors and the people who tendered out the work. There are tens of thousands of sets of regulations and the manufacturer simply makes the product, they don't install it or decide whether it's acceptable or not in a given situation. That's assuming of course that it was manufactured according to their stated specifications and shortcuts weren't taken during the production process that altered it's fire rating.

That just suggests that the weak link was possibly not at that spot. This is pure speculation, but suppose for a moment, that some fantastic company made a bunch of construction materials. A contractor buys one of them, but pretends that it's a different one. That way they can skimp on costs.

I'm interested to know, when the dust settles, what really happened.

It seems at no point did anyone think to independently test these materials for the situation in which they would be used (high rise vs low rise etc). If they had indeed not met a certain specification that would have been identified as part of the testing. It could very well be that a contractor has misused the material either by accident or on purpose to save money.

 

[Danoff]

It seems at no point did anyone think to independently test these materials for the situation in which they would be used (high rise vs low rise etc). If they had indeed not met a certain specification that would have been identified as part of the testing.

I don't really know what that means. A sample of the siding that was to go to that particular building was not tested? Or the material was never tested for what it was certified for? Because if it's the latter... that's an awfully big goof up. That'd be like selling airbags with shrapnel in them.

 

[Robin]

I don't really know what that means. A sample of the siding that was to go to that particular building was not tested? Or the material was never tested for what it was certified for? Because if it's the latter... that's an awfully big goof up. That'd be like selling airbags with shrapnel in them.

How can 70 buildings all have cladding that failed testing?! Did 70 (presumably different contractors) all make the same decision/mistake? So it could indeed be the latter and a monumental manufacturing mess up. As for airbags today Takata filed for bankruptcy because of that!

 

[Danoff]

How can 70 buildings all have cladding that failed testing! Did 70 (presumably different contractors) all make the same decision/mistake? So it could indeed be the latter and a monumental manufacturing mess up. As for airbags today Takata filed for bankruptcy because of that!

Or maybe the same supplier got the job over and over because they were the lowest bidder. Or maybe they got the job because they did the last one and it was still standing. Or maybe they changed names over and over to limit company liability. There's a lot of potential here.

Edit:

It's even possible that someone else realized a game was being played and got in on it. Or maybe the company you're talking about skipped certification. It wouldn't be the first time a huge company with a decent reputation intentionally bypassed government regulations for profit (ehemvw).

 

[Famine]

It was made by Saint Gobain (a name you have probably seen on car windscreen glass) and you would think a serious company like that would make something that meets the standards it claims to meet.

It seems at no point did anyone think to independently test these materials for the situation in which they would be used (high rise vs low rise etc).

Hang on a minute... You seem to be suggesting that the product did not meet the standards required, its producers claimed it met the standards required, and independent testing would have revealed that it did not meet those standards?

That would be a rather serious allegation and not one I've seen backed up in any way by the news.

What I've seen is the suggestion that this material is made as building cladding and is legal under some building standards but not under others and may have been used either knowingly or unknowingly by contractors for purposes for which it did not meet building standards.

The company (which I'd read was Arconic, formerly Alcoa, and I don't know what the connection to Saint-Gobain is) says it has now withdrawn the product because of inconsistencies in building codes across the world. That may suggest that it's legal to use for tower blocks, but not in Britain. It could be that Arconic has supplied the cladding knowing it was unsuitable for the job (except they wouldn't know what the job was), or assuming it was due to legality elsewhere (except, again, they wouldn't know what the job was), or just supplied it to a client. I've never been asked if the bricks I'm buying are to be used in a castle, garage or barbecue, because suppliers don't ask or need to know, so I suspect it's just the latter.

 

[TenEightyOne]

How can 70 buildings all have cladding that failed testing?! Did 70 (presumably different contractors) all make the same decision/mistake?

I covered that a little earlier: there are concerns from some (genuine) experts about the way these tests are being conducted. Some observers feel that they don't reflect the methods or standards of full British Standard testing and as such aren't necessarily accurate.

If that were true then a cynic might wonder if the new Government needs to be seen to be decisively fixing this huge problem regardless of the accuracy of their new assessments.