"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 19:35:33 on Fri, 1 Nov
2019, Chang remarked:

No cos the outside was alight.

Correct.

To be honest I do feel the witch hunt for the Fire service here is a
little unfair. Why?

Not a witch hunt so much as making it clear that
the policy of telling the inhabitants to stay in their
flats wasnt the correct approach once it was clear
that the whole thing was going up in flames very
spectacularly indeed.

But there is also the problem about how they are
told to evacuate once its obvious that they need to

Many of the residents in question were hanging on the phone with
? the 099 service operators trying to keep them calm (and inside).

What percentage of the residents tho ? It can't have been all that
many given that 2/3 of them did leave the building successfully.

The enquiry is about the fate of the roughly 1/4 of the residents who
*were* still inside, being told to stay put.

and how well that would have worked with just one set of stairs with
so much smoke there.

The Fire Brigade have breathing apparatus, and could, if
they had been trained to do so, set up some kind of 'human
chain' to facilitate the evacuation as much as possible.

But its far from clear how successful that would have been
given just one set of stairs and all those people and clearly
only a limited amount of that breathing apparatus.

They had 50 fire engines and 200+ firemen on site.

But its far from clear how successful that would have been
given just one set of stairs and all those people and clearly
only a limited amount of that breathing apparatus.

How many of the 72 do you think might have been saved if the "stay put"
policy had been cancelled let's say an hour earlier?

Impossible to know even if the 999 call records
were analysed to see if that caller did survive.

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.

But it should be possible to stop it happening again.

That's what people said after the Lakanal House fire. But nothing was
apparently learned.

It has this time with that type of cladding.

Are you sure?

Yep, plenty of buildings have been identified
with equally unsuitable cladding, world wide.

Not by the LFB. The question was: "What did LFB learn from Lakanal".

That wasnt a problem with the cladding.

Has the LFB now trained its personnel in dealing with such fires, and
changed the "stay put" policy?

Better to replace that very dangerous cladding.

Thats obviously going to take some time
but clearly that sort of fire is very uncommon.

Most major disasters are "quite uncommon". But lessons get learnt.

And they will be with Grenfell too if only about the cladding.