London Rises Up Again Despite Horrific Fire

Once again London and its community rise up to help after the single worst fire tragedy in many peoples living memory. This incident is far far worse than the three terror attacks in the UK.
After some kind of fire on the 4th floor of a 24 story Tower block, 120 apartments with 600 residents - home to many of the poorest in London in the middle of the richest Borough in London, Kensington & Chelsea - the fire took hold of the entire building in barely 30 minutes.
30 are dead, and 76 others are unaccounted for and not expected to be found alive, as it will take weeks to recover all bodies. 18 of the 80 injured are in intensive care.
The community response from the moment the fire started at 00.54 on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning has been heroic. 1000s of us who live in London - from all parts - have collected many tons of clothes, food and water and all the essentials for the people who escaped the block.
As this block was refurbished in 2016, it did not follow the proposals from an Inquest that reported in 2013 on a fire of similar nature in a Tower block in 2009. The cladding was a cheaper burnable plastic material, no sprinkler system, no working central fire alarm and only one stairwell!
This is the biggest political and social crisis in my memory that poor social housing has led to this horrific tragedy.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-40272168

 

I can't understand the lack of sprinklers. I don't believe there is anywhere in the US that would allow that in a building that size. That's insane.

 

After the fire at Lakenhall House (another social housing building) in South London in 2009 when 6 people died, a long Inquest took place and its final report was issued in 2013 when it called on the Government to revise building regulations that included higher flammability resistance in Cladding, centrally controlled fire alarms and, most importantly, sprinkler systems be retrofitted in all of the 4000+ Tower Blocks in local council ownership.
Regulations already existed for sprinklers in new builds, and since Local Councils stopped building Tower blocks in the 1970s, all the newer Towers were private and had state of the art fire safety. Successive Ministers in the governments from 2013 until today kept putting a revision of building regulations aside. Basically, indications from civil servants off the record is that Ministers would say 'Yes we will get around to it but nobody is dying'!
UK Fire Regulations hadn't been revised since 2004 - when they did say NEW builds must include the features that would have saved Grenfell Tower - but not for refurbishments. Basically the only people living in unsafe Tower blocks have been relatively poor social tenants and that's why the anger now after Grenfell is actually very serious. People in blocks literally yards away from Grenfell are petrified now.
Especially now we know that Grenfell was refurbished with a new cladding skin that is aluminium panels with flammable plastic (polyethylene) fillings. They saved £5000 IN TOTAL on choosing those 2500 panels rather than ones with a fire resistant filling.
The cost of putting in sprinklers would have added £200,000 to the total refurbishment cost of about £8.6 million but the people in control - ignoring years of demands by residents (right up to last November!) - refused.
The Prime Minister today was in her car chased by 100s of people banging her car, as the day before she met the emergency workers secretly and refused to meet residents and families - even though the Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn talked with and mingled with them, and the Queen and Prince William did the same this morning.
Coming after the defeat of the PM last week in the general election (now having to do a deal with 10 right wing Northern Irish MPs) even her own ministers couldn't believe she wouldn't actually meet these grief stricken people.
The council who funded and organised the faulty refurbishment of Grenfell Tower - and ignored residents fears about safety for years - is the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (RBKC), the wealthiest borough in the UK and the wealthiest neighbourhood bar none, where the 'average' price of a residential property is £1.4 MILLION. North Kensington, where Grenfell Tower is situated, is a small part of RBKC that is one of the poorest neighbourhoods in London and the UK generally. It's make up is overwhelmingly working class and highly mixed in race and nationalities with people working in low paid or minimum wage jobs. And people living in Grenfell Tower were the lucky ones! A similar sized property of 1-3 bedrooms would cost 3.5-4 TIMES more privately in rent. And social housing is in such short supply in London now that large numbers with children are forced - by councils like RKBC - to live in cities and towns outside London often breaking their cultural and national ties with others locally, because councils like RBKC refuse, and others do not have the money, to build more affordable social housing.
This fire is not only a criminal act of neglect by making poor people live in less safe places than others, but a massive social indictment of the terrible crisis of housing in the UK generally, and London and the South East especially, that has grown over the last 40 years.
Within London as a whole buying a property is out of the question for the vast majority including those on earnings well above average unless they have a pot of £100,000-200,000 as a DEPOSIT. Private rents are head-spinning almost making Manhattan and central Paris look cheap.

Within a tiny southern radius of Grenfell Tower, there are 1,399 EMPTY luxury apartments bought by Russians, Chinese and other foriegn nationals as INVESTMENTS. They don't occupy them and rarely rent them out as they don't need to! Property values have increased - without a break and despite Brexit - for the last 15-18 years.
The river Thames, on both sides from the east right through to the far west is AWASH with unoccupied luxury housing.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40298473

 

Horrible event. Made so much worse since the death toll would have been much, much lower with proper codes being followed.

But out of curiosity Max, what is wrong with people owning luxury property and doing what they wish with it? (as long as it is legal.) Also, if they bought an investment, then someone took a profit from that investment when they sold it. Not sure about how it is in the UK, but here in the US, when you own property, you pay a tax based on the value of the property. So a person owning investment luxury property is most likely paying a lot more in taxes for services they don't take advantage of if they don't live in the property.

 

Sadly Fred, the laws in the UK on ownership of property enable anyone, from anywhere, to own it without any property taxes - literally zero - and with no regulations around residence. Unlike in countries like Singapore where 18 months proven residence is required before ownership is allowed.
Council Tax in the wealthiest boroughs of London is incredibly low which makes residential sales an 'investment' to the buyer with zero financial incentives to at least have it occupied. The housing shortage in London is now so severe mostly because what has been built this past 20 years is out of the reach financially to those most in need.
The problem of non-occupation of luxury apartments is not 'individual' Russian, Chinese, Kuwaiti or others buying property, they are bought by investment companies on behalf of these people. And that's probably fine if at the same time sufficient homes were being built for people at affordable prices and rents. But that isn't happening. It is the very people who keep the city going - the cleaners, janitors, cooks, security guards, clerical workers, nurses, fire officers and many others who now, if they want somewhere to live that's affordable, have to commute from outside or the very edges of London. 3 hours a day commuting to and from London is not uncommon.

EDIT: David it is about a human tragedy of the most awful and preventable kind that is a horror to everyone, and transcends politics.

 

No post here has suggested the seizing of any property so that's an inaccurate reference.
One political figure (but no one in this thread) has suggested using legal powers to requisition unoccupied/unused apartments nearby for those families. There is nothing unusual about that and has happened many times in many countries. But as you have now raised it David, I wouldn't be opposed to it.

Those families that number more than 400 people, possibly greater, will of course have to be rehoused and that will happen.

The initial actual cause of the fire in one apartment on the 4th floor is irrelevant even though the investigation will attempt to discover that. It is HOW the fire spread to the entire block in minutes that is the main issue.
There is no 'speculation' about what assisted that. It is now a known factually exactly what cladding material was used, that it was the same as in Lakenhall Tower in 2009, and the same material has been used in several other blocks in other locations by the very same contractors. Every single Fire Safety Expert asked to comment (many have commented) have stated clearly that the cladding material used wasn't sufficiently fire resistant and that further investigations will also show whether the method of attachment was faulty, and whether the fire resistant construction between floors was faulty.
It is also not 'speculation' that the refurbishment did not include a central controlled fire alarm system, did no include sprinklers, and did not include a second external fire escape route. All those things were recommended in the 2013 Coroner report and already applied to NEW buildings since 2004.
Fires similar to Grenfell - but not quite as bad - have happened in Australia and Dubai and in those cases the cladding (similar to Grenfell) was a direct cause of the spread of fire.
It's because so much is already known, that anger is so great.
Solicitors representing the Lakenhall victims and families, and now representing an increasing number of the Grenfell families are now pushing very strongly for a Coroner-led, Jury based Inquest for Grenfell and not a 'Public Inquiry' alas only the former guarantees all those affected right to question witnesses, rights to legal representation, and rights to call their own witnesses.
https://www.change.org/p/this-gover...rounding-community-their-voices-must-be-heard

 

Yes you may have heard the suggestion on TV - from Jeremy Corbyn actually who suggested legal powers could be used to requisition unoccupied properties locally for the victims- but you didn't here about it in this thread.
I believe things will be learned and acted upon this time for many reasons:
1. It was so devastatingly bad that for some Americans living in London now said it was similar to 9/11 actually seeing people screaming, and jumping out of windows to their death and one infant thrown out by its mother - the infant survived the mother didn't.
2. The residents themselves had been protesting to the council before and during the Grenfell refurbishment and after as in November last year - all about Fire Safety. https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/
3. The incompetence of the local wealthy Council in - even as at Friday night - in its often invisible help for the victims and often absence of any communication
4. Prime Minister May's bizarre decision to avoid residents when she visited - to the shock of even her own ministers.
5. The rush of ministers like Sajid Javid to say, again and again, whatever recommendations are made we will do them no matter the cost!
6. The current government was almost defeated a week before and is now on the ropes, Theresa May wont now last weeks let alone months, and there is a seriously possibility that a further General Election will happen. That will now be won by Corbyn without any doubt and these failures in social housing will be put right.

 

Yes that will be part of the investigation because the reason for the 'stay put' advice is based on each apartment in the block being fire resistant all around it - main entrance doors, windows, ceiling and ground construction - for a minimum of 30 minutes, so that the Fire Brigade would arrive before any spread.
So aside from the cladding there were internal failures that meant each apartment was NOT fire resistant for any length of time. But when the FB did arrive, that advice changed immediately to get out now.

 

We now know factually that the cladding used on the Tower was the least fire-resistant manufactured and is banned in high rise buildings in the USA and completely banned in Germany. It cost £2 per panel less than the most fire resistant type.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/81...-ban-cladding-flammable-material-death-London