Golden thread


high rise towers had no valid fire check from their local authority, one council having only carried out fire risk assessments on two of its 112 tower blocks. It was suggested by an expert interviewed


by the BBC that tower blocks were supposed to have an hour’s fire resistance, but Brittany Point – another 22 storey tower block in London – did not even have ten minutes. He went on to brand it a ‘disaster waiting to happen’. Failings included a 13 year gap in recorded fire hose services. A chartered surveyor specialising in fire risk, to whom the BBC also spoke, said he had been warning about it for 20 years. However, the warnings went unheeded and


local residents were continually ignored. On the night of the Grenfell fire, the Grenfell Action Group (GAG) – a blog campaigning for the rights of the residents of Lancaster West Estate – published a blog post documenting previous posts it had made highlighting the fire dangers within the tower. It included a post from as far back as 2013, with one post reporting a power surge3


which destroyed electrical appliances in


the building. Before the fire, the blog attracted a weekly


readership of around 200 people. On the day of the incident, the editors said it received nearly three million views4


during the first 24 hours.


This continued throughout the four months following the disaster, with blog posts reaching an average of 10,000 views per month.


Grenfell legacy


The anger and outcry over how a disaster on this scale could have happened led to widespread acceptance that the fire safety equipment, systems and processes for these tower blocks – and indeed all social housing – need overhauling. Yet now, three years since the fire at Grenfell, residents of similar buildings still do not feel safe in their homes, and their safety concerns have not been properly addressed. An investigation by the Labour Party in July revealed that the vast majority (95%) of


20195


social housing tower blocks in England are still without sprinkler systems – ten years after the Lakanal House fire, which initiated the calls for sprinklers in tall social housing blocks. The pressure for adequate sprinkler systems to be properly installed in all high rise buildings has grown6


Martin Moore-Bick’s report7


following the release of phase one of Sir into the causes of the


Grenfell Tower fire. Although Sir Martin does not focus closely


on fire safety equipment inside the building, he does place emphasis on the fact that a working sprinkler system would have had an impact on the amount of time the fire took to spread. The issue is compounded by the social injustice of privately owned tower blocks occupied by wealthy residents having the highest standards of safety equipment, whilst social housing remains dangerously underprepared for fire.


FOCUS


www.frmjournal.com JUNE 2020


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