FOCUS
Different buildings
Everyone cut corners. So long as noone saw what was being done, it would not be their problem.
Other concerns
Engineers Phillips Consultants, a wholly owned subsidiary company of the TWA group, set to work adapting the Danish Larsen Nielsen system. The Danes only considered that this system was safe up to four storeys, and above that, they post tensioned the structure. TWA would take it up to 22. Other large panel systems followed suit. While the structures would stand, it did not mean they were safe. Wandsworth’s district surveyor, Mr Hall,
had already challenged London City Council (LCC), observing that there was no lateral restraint where floor slabs met the walls at the critical H2 flank wall joint, apart from a series of hardboard pads. He demanded a mechanical tie. TWA produced a metal fishplate, claiming it met the requirements of BS CP111, Part 304, introduced worldwide after the collapse of the Quebec Bridge in 1907. The tie was never taken seriously on site. Of the 15 inspected on site in 1968, 14 of them were loose. I found a similar situation in 1986, when Ronan Point was dismantled. Another, more worrying, position was the condition of the lifting bolts. The nuts on the lifting bolts had never been wound down. Bolts bent under the action of the dead load and the sway caused by high winds – something that Cyril Willson had
18 JULY/AUGUST 2018
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warned about. But it was the forgotten issue of fire on the structure as a whole and how individual parts behaved in high temperatures that should have caused major concerns. As Recommendation (42) of the 1968 Ronan Point Report stated: ‘The Building Regulations do not deal with the effect of fire on the structure as a whole (paragraph 216)’. That still appears to be the case today.
Structural fire risk
In July 1984, the fire test in Ronan Point proved for the first time the weakness of the structure in a fire: within ten minutes, the structural expansion of the floor slabs had caused the H2 joint to come close to failure. The test had been carried out, at my request, by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) and Fire Research Station. The reason for the failure had been hidden in plain sight for many years in Recommendation 42, so this problem was not new.
On the day of the collapse in 1968, I
went to the office of George Fairweather FRIBA, high above the Wigmore Hall. He was the chair of BS CP3, Chapter IV, Part 1: Fire Precautions and Means of Escape in blocks of flats and maisonettes above 80’0” (1962). In 1964, my then wife – who worked for Fairweather – had been on a visit to Morris Walk with a group of students from the Architectural Association (AA). As they stood on a floor slab of a ten storey block, a wall panel was lowered into place. It would
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