"Brian Gaff (Sofa)" wrote in message
...
No cos the outside was alight.
To be honest I do feel the witch hunt for the Fire service here is a
little unfair. Why?
Well the advice to stay in your room is sound had it not been for
extensive work done on the building which compromised the sealed unit
approach. Remember no sprinklers and not many stairs, due to the age of
the building. If there had been a stampede out people would have been
trampled. I am not aware that the fire service were aware of the dire
state of the modifications to the structure. If a criticism is needed its
why the residents warnings about the problems for some years had not been
passed on to the fire service who might have had more clout to get the
issues fixed before the inevitable happened.
It is as is so often the case easy with 2020 hindsight to be critical. Its
not going to bring people back. The whole modification and fire approval
of buildings scheme needs a rethink.

Yes, the main blame for the fire needs to be placed on the people that
specified a flammable cladding and/or those who installed it - and it's
quite possible that one thing was specified and a very different thing was
actually installed.

The fire brigade advice of "stay put" was bad *in the circumstances*. I
hadn't realised that there was no way to communicate with the residents
(building-wide PA, two different fire alarm signals) to tell them to
evacuate instead of staying put.

Hopefully lessons will be learned about:

- no flammable cladding

- better comms between fire-fighters on the ground and those making
decisions that more junior on-the-ground officers were not authorised to
take

- need for PA system or two-tone alarm to tell residents when to stay put
and when to evacuate

- need for more than one staircase or else lifts that are immune to loss of
building power (*), so evacuation and fire brigade use don't come into
conflict

- need for fire brigade to be informed of any changes to a building (eg
cladding) which may affect evacuation advice


If residents had been told to stay put in the event of a fire, I wonder
whether there would have been any way to countermand that advice, even if
the fire brigade had assessed the situation and officers had appreciated it
and made the decision *immediately*. Even "immediately" might have been too
late if there was no PA or coded alarm to tell people to evacuate, despite
safety briefings to the contrary.


(*) As is common in very tall skyscrapers in the US: separate protected
power supply to the lift motors that bypasses all RCD protection which could
trip the normal building power in the event of water and electricity mixing.