Towering inferno could happen here

LONDON’S Grenfell Tower deadly inferno, where flames leapt from floor to floor through the 24-storey block, has set off alarm bells in Australia.

Senator Nick Xenophon has called for an urgent audit of all buildings across Australia suspected of containing non-compliant materials.

Senator Xenophon told Nine’s Today show an audit was needed to ensure flammable building products were not being used on Australian buildings.

“We need to know what is being used on apartment buildings, including those being retrofitted, are fire retardant and meet Australian standards,” he said.

“Some of this cladding is okay to use on a singlestorey build but not for multi-storey buildings and the problem is we just don’t know the extent of it.

“When you have firefighters saying this stuff makes our job almost impossible to do, that is very disturbing.”

Senator Xenophon is on the Senate committee that will hand down a report this year on nonconforming building projects.

He told The Australian the London blaze was a “much more serious version of Lacrosse”, referring to the 2014 fire that engulfed the Lacrosse building in Melbourne Docklands in less than 11 minutes. The Senate inquiry formed in June 2015, seven months after the fire.

It was determined the Lacrosse fire was started by a cigarette on a cluttered balcony, according a report by the Metropolitan Fire Brigade.

The report criticised the use of illegal cladding imported cheaply from China and installed in breach of Australia’s building code and fire and safety regulations.

The cladding was Alucobest – aluminium on the outside and polyethylene fibre on the inside.

A NSW government report, obtained by the state opposition under freedom of information laws, identified up to 2500 buildings in the state may have the same sort of exterior. The report was made in September 2015.

Jeff Wilkinson, one of Britain’s leading building inspectors and fire engineers, told the ABC the Grenfell Tower block fire was the “worst tragedy” he’d seen in 30 years.

“I’ve never seen a building go up in this way,” he said.

Mr Wilkinson said while fingers were being pointed at the aluminium cladding – part of refurbishment works carried out – it was too early to determine what caused the fire to spread so rapidly.

Construction, Forestry and Mining Union South Australia secretary Aaron Cartledge said cladding was supposed to contain fireretardant “sandwich” material, but cheap noncompliant filler material imported from China could actually be highly flammable.

He said developers could sometimes be tempted to import low-cost filler materials that didn’t comply with the Australian standard.

One developer has told the Daily Telegraph that aluminium cladding now under the microscope in London is “common” in Sydney.