Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Fire risks must be addressed at flats
Cigarette butts on stairs on estate building A report last week revealed serious safety concerns about the construction of buildings on the firehit Tannery estate. Resident and Gazette reporter Alex Claridge gives his thoughts on the latest plans
As a client of the Town and Country Housing Group for just over a year, I’ve never had any reason to complain about its service or staff.
Indeed, Tannery residents received a letter saying its engineers would be fitting two extra smoke detectors in our flats last Wednesday, and they did as promised, promptly and efficiently.
But fitting extra smoke detectors in the flats and communal areas shows just how painfully Town and Country has misread our worries since the great fire of 2015.
We were not concerned that the smoke or fire detection systems were inadequate. We were astonished at how quickly the blaze in Creine Mill North spread.
The detection system worked perfectly given the fact all the residents of that block were out of their flats and in the road when the first clouds of smoke began to billow into the warm summer’s air from a first floor window.
No one was hurt, no one even suffered any smoke inhalation, because no one was inside.
I had been in my third floor flat overlooking the building and watched as plumes of smoke rapidly turned into a raging inferno ripping through the entire block. This took just 20 minutes.
Lack of smoke detectors were not the problem. Materials and construction techniques which proved not in the least bit fire retardant were the problem.
As I said I have, I have no cause to complain about Town and Country as it is not the company which built the Tannery.
It visited the other residents, checking whether they were OK and needed anything.
The firm’s letter to us last week states that “there are no additional risks of a fire starting at the Tannery”. That’s a partial relief, I suppose.
I, however, have identified an additional fire risk – and one that worries me very much. For the past few months, I have been stepping out of my flat to find cigarettes which have been left to burn out on carpets in the communal corridors and stairwells.
One was left right outside my door.
When I started looking, I discovered various cigarette endsized black scorches in the carpet. Another cigarette butt was stuffed in between a window and its fixture.
You can tell by the shape of the ash that these cigarettes have not been stubbed out, but left on the carpet to burn out.
It’s probably only one or two people at most, but my Drying Shed Lane building faces the one which today is still a firedestroyed mess.
I simply cannot believe that just a few feet from the scene of last year’s devastation someone is so lazy, so stupid and so reckless that they are literally inviting a repeat of last year’s Tannery blaze.