Cladding in tower fire on sale in NZ
Aluminium cladding, which has been cited as a possible factor in the rapid spread of London’s highrise fire, is also on sale in New Zealand. But experts say only a fireproof version is supposed to be used for residential buildings.
Seventeen people are known to have died and more than 70 been injured from a devastating fire which engulfed Grenfell Tower in west London on Wednesday. About 600 people lived in the block’s 120 apartments.
Last night London fire commissioner Dany Cotton said authorities ‘‘genuinely don’t know’’ how many people had died with ‘‘unknown numbers’’ of bodies still in the tower block.
The building, which had recently been refurbished, was quickly engulfed, leading to speculation that it had been clad in a non-fire resistant ACM or ‘‘aluminium composite material’’.
Building and Construction Minister Nick Smith said the building code was amended in January to restrict the use of combustible cladding in buildings after fires in Melbourne’s Docklands in 2014 and apartment fires in Dubai.
‘‘I am advised that these systems are not prevalent in New Zealand,’’ he said.
‘‘I have asked the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to contact councils and check whether any high-rise buildings have been constructed with these materials prior to the amendments earlier this year.’’
Smith said New Zealand’s style of housing was changing, with more people living in high-rise apartments that carried greater fire risk.
‘‘Our building regulations need to keep pace with this change in living styles, and ensure that New Zealand never experiences what occurred at the Grenfell Tower in London.’’
There are several brands of ACM and one importer, PSP, said it imported three forms of a product called Alucobuild: one for signage, one for low-level commercial buildings, and a fire-resistant product for multi-storey buildings.
PSP finance director Dean Hodgson said he expected architects and developers to specify the right product.
‘‘We went out to our customer base a few years to get them to reassure us that it had never been used in anything [inappropriately] and they all came back to us and said, no no, it’s only ever been used on low-level stuff . . .’’
Councils were also aware of the need for ‘‘correct specs’’; however, once it was up, Hodgson said it was not easy to tell whether the fireresistant version had been used.
Gordon Buswell, chairman of the Building Industry Federation, raised the issue of product substitution. There was always a risk of people cutting corners with cheaper products.
Meanwhile, social media alerts have been posted by families desperate to find missing loved ones.
Among them are a marketing manager, an emerging artist and several children including three from one family, UK media report.
The missing include marketing manager Mariem Elgwahry, who lived in the 19th floor of the tower. She last spoke to her mother at 2.30am and had not been heard from since, the Telegraph reported.
Khadija Saye was Facebook messaging at 3am from the room she was trapped in with her mother Mary Mendy.
Hamid Ali Jafari said that his 82-year-old father, Ali Yawar, had not been seen since the early hours of the morning as the family were trying to escape the blaze.
Teaching assistant, Nadia, 33, is understood to have lived on one of the top floors with her husband, three daughters and mother-inlaw. One of her daughters is thought to have rung a friend, saying: ‘‘I don’t think I’m going to make it.’’
"All our warnings fell on deaf ears. We predicted that a catastrophe like this was inevitable and just a matter of time." Grenfell Action Group
BRITAIN: Through the night and deep into the day, the crackling fire raged, sweeping through apartments and destroying lives like an out-of-control inferno from an earlier century, or perhaps from a less affluent part of the world.
But this was London. This was 2017. And the Grenfell Tower fire was unlike any seen here in recent memory, a blaze that transformed a 24-storey high-rise that was once home to about 500 people into a charred ruin on the city’s otherwise gleaming skyline.
The fire marked a fresh trauma in a city already roiled by terrorist attacks, an unhappy and divisive political campaign, and the lingering uncertainty over Brexit.
But it was also, residents of the public housing development bitterly said, the specific and predictable result of years of warnings that had gone unheeded; an emblem of a city that is neglecting its most vulnerable residents even as it increasingly caters to the whims of the ultra-rich.
In one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods of London - a short amble from the homes of celebrities and royals - people living in one of the city’s increasingly in-demand havens of affordable housing jumped from 20 floors up after being trapped by the advancing flames.
Police said yesterday 12 people had died and more than 70 had been injured. But with many people still unaccounted for, the toll was almost certain to rise.
Authorities said the investigation would take time to assess what officials hinted could amount to a series of failures that, together, amounted to what London Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton described as ‘‘an unprecedented incident’’.
Residents who survived praised firefighters but blamed the fire on official neglect. They said they had repeatedly raised fire safety concerns, which they said included the building’s inadequate escape routes, the absence of an integrated alarm system, and a renovation last year that they worried had left their building clad in panels that were shiny and new but not up to code.
‘‘Anyone who earns below £10 million is not human in this borough,’’ said James Wood, a resident of an adjacent public housing development who claimed that he and people from Grenfell Tower had lobbied the local council to take the issue seriously, to no avail. ‘‘They don’t care about fire safety.’’
The web page of the Grenfell Action Group, a residents’ organisation, testified to the long-standing concerns, with blog entries stretching back years that warned of the dangers.
‘‘All our warnings fell on deaf ears,’’ the group said in a post added after the fire broke out. ‘‘We predicted that a catastrophe like this was inevitable and just a matter of time.’’
The target of the group’s ire the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, which runs public housing in the area on behalf of the local council issued a statement in which it acknowledged that residents had earlier raised concerns and vowed to ‘‘co-operate fully with all the relevant authorities in order to ascertain the cause of this tragedy’’.
Nick Paget-Brown, who leads the council, also acknowledged that residents had had longstanding concerns, though he did not discuss them specifically.
Paget-Brown told the BBC that there would be ‘‘a thorough investigation into why the fire started and why it spread so quickly’’.
Although officials would not speculate, experts said yesterday their focus was on the building’s exterior cladding, which is supposed to be fireproof but which witnesses said had burned like paper, quickly spreading the fire from unit to unit and from floor to floor.
The first hint that something was wrong came just before 1am local time when, according to a fourth-floor resident interviewed by the BBC, a neighbour knocked on the door to say his ‘‘fridge had exploded’’.
Experts said firefighters should have had time to extinguish the blaze before it spread to other units. Instead, it leapt within minutes to other floors - but somehow never triggered any buildingwide alarms.
Muslim residents of Grenfell Tower, who were awake during the night because they were observing Ramadan, helped to save lives as the deadly fire tore through the block, witnesses say.
A local woman said more people would have died if not for the actions of a number of Muslim boys who knocked on doors, yelling in an attempt to alert residents in the absence of fire alarms.
‘‘If it wasn’t for all these young Muslims, young boys round here, coming from mosques ... people would have [died]. A lot more people would have [died],’’ she said. ’’People want to talk about them when they do wrong, and all this sort of thing, when they’re doing bad - but when they’re doing good ...
‘‘They were the first people with bags of water, giving to people and helping people - running and telling people.’’
During the fasting month of Ramadan, Muslims do not eat during daylight, instead staying up late and getting up early to do so.
Another resident told The Huffington Post that the young Muslims made the difference for a number of sleeping families. ’’They ran around knocking on people’s doors,’’ she said. ‘‘Thank God for Ramadan.’’
Khalid Suleman Ahmed, 20, who moved to the eighth floor of Grenfell Tower not long ago, said he had stayed up to eat before daylight fasting began about 4.45am.
‘‘No fire alarms went off and there were no warning. I was playing PlayStation, waiting to eat suhur [the meal that begins the fast], then smelt smoke. I got up and looked out of my window and saw the seventh floor smoking,’’ he said.
‘‘I would be up this late on a Friday night possibly, but never a random midweek night unless it was Ramadan.
‘‘There are a lot of Muslims living there and people choose up to stay up and wait, so it was certainly a factor for me and others. It probably did save lives.’’
- Washington Post, Fairfax