Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Officials blame Arconic-made panels for spreading fire

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a national tragedy. The London police on Friday blamed flammable materials used in the facade for the spread of the blaze and said the investigat­ion could bring charges of manslaught­er. Over the weekend, hundreds of families were evacuated from high-rises in Britain that posed similar risks.

Flames consumed Grenfell Tower so quickly that arriving firefighte­rs wondered if they could even get inside. People trapped on the higher floors screamed for their lives through broken windows. At least 79 people died, a toll that is expected to rise as more bodies are recovered. Survivors have charged that the facade was installed to beautify their housing project for the benefit of wealthy neighbors.

A formal government inquiry into the fire has just begun. But interviews with tenants, industry executives and fire safety engineers point to a gross failure of government oversight, a refusal to heed warnings from inside Britain and around the world, and a drive by successive government­s from both major political parties to free businesses from the burden of safety regulation­s.

Promising to cut “red tape,” business-friendly politician­s evidently judged that cost concerns outweighed the risks of allowing flammable materials to be used in facades. Builders in Britain were allowed to wrap residentia­l apartment towers — perhaps several hundred of them — from top to bottom in highly flammable materials, a practice forbidden in the United States and many European countries. And companies did not hesitate to supply the British market.

Arconic’s chief executive recently stepped down after an unusual public battle with an activist shareholde­r. The industry titan sells a flammable polyethyle­ne version of its Reynobond cladding and a more expensive, fire-resistant version.

Arconic has marketed the flammable facades in Britain for years, even as it has adjusted its pitch elsewhere. In other European countries, Arconic’s sales materials explicitly instructed that “as soon as the building is higher than the firefighte­rs’ ladders, it has to be conceived with an incombusti­ble material.” An Arconic website for British customers said only that such use “depends on local building codes.”

For years, members of Parliament had written letters requesting new restrictio­ns on cladding, especially as the same flammable facades were blamed for fires in Britain, France, the United Arab Emirates, Australia and elsewhere. Yet British authoritie­s resisted new rules. A top building regulator explained to a coroner in 2013 that requiring only noncombust­ible exteriors in residentia­l towers “limits your choice of materials quite significan­tly.”

Fire safety experts said the blaze at Grenfell Tower was a catastroph­e that could have been avoided, if warnings had been heeded.

When the refrigerat­or on the fourth floor at Grenfell Tower burst into flames, the fire ignited the flammable cladding and shot up the side of the building. The London police confirmed that Friday and identified the refrigerat­or brand as Hotpoint. But experts who saw footage of the blaze had known the culprit at once. “You can tell immediatel­y it’s the cladding,” said Glenn Corbett, an associate professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

The first well-known use of aluminum cladding on a high-rise was on the Alcoa Building, in Pittsburgh, erected as the manufactur­er’s headquarte­rs. Makers of cladding promoted it as both aesthetica­lly striking and energy-efficient, because the aluminum surface reflects back heat and light. Demand for cladding surged with rising fuel costs and concerns about global warming, and over time, producers began selling it in a thin “sandwich” design: Two sheets of aluminum around a core made of flammable plastics like polyethyle­ne.

The cladding is typically paired with a much thicker layer of foam insulation against the building’s exterior wall, as was the case at Grenfell Tower. Then the cladding may be affixed to the wall with metal studs, leaving a narrow gap between the cladding and the insulation.

But by 1998, regulators in the United States — where deaths from fires are historical­ly more common than in Britain or Western Europe — began requiring realworld simulation­s to test any materials to be used in buildings taller than a firefighte­r’s two-story ladder. “The U.S. codes say you have to test your assembly exactly the way you install it in a building,” said Robert Solomon, an engineer at the National Fire Protection Associatio­n, which is funded in part by insurance companies and drafts model codes followed in the United States and around the world.

No aluminum cladding made with pure polyethyle­ne — the type used at Grenfell Tower — has ever passed the test, experts in the United States say. The aluminum sandwichin­g always failed in the heat of a fire, exposing the flammable filling. And the air gap between the cladding and the insulation could act as a chimney, intensifyi­ng the fire and sucking flames up the side of a building. Attempts to install inflammabl­e barriers at vertical and horizontal intervals were ineffectiv­e in practice.

As a result, U.S. building codes have effectivel­y banned flammable cladding in high-rises for nearly two decades. The codes also require many additional safeguards, especially in new buildings or major renovation­s: automatic sprinkler systems, fire alarms, loudspeake­rs to provide emergency instructio­ns, pressurize­d stairways designed to keep smoke out and multiple stairways or fire escapes.

And partly because of the influence of U.S. architects, many territorie­s around the world follow the U.S. example. But not Britain.

But as early as 1999, after a fire in Irvine, Scotland, British fire safety engineers warned Parliament that the advent of flammable cladding had opened a dangerous loophole in the regulation­s. The Irvine fire saw flames leap up panels at Garnock Court, a 14-story public housing block. One resident died, four were injured and a parliament­ary committee investigat­ed the causes.

The firefighte­rs and engineers warned Parliament that British codes required only that the aluminum used in cladding resist ignition, even though the heat of a fire would breach the surface and expose the flammable material inside. Nor did the British rules require a test to evaluate risks in realworld conditions.

But manufactur­ers argued against new tests or rules. Using fire-resistant materials was more expensive, a cost that industry advocates opposed.

Business-friendly government­s in Britain — first under Labour and then under the Conservati­ves — campaigned to pare back regulation­s. A 2005 law known as the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order ended a requiremen­t for government inspectors to certify that buildings had met fire codes, and shifted instead to a system of self-policing. Government­s adopted slogans calling for the eliminatio­n of at least one regulation for each new one that was imposed, and the authoritie­s in charge of fire safety took this to heart.

“If you think more fire protection would be good for U.K. business, then you should be making the case to the business community, not the government,” Brian Martin, the top civil servant in charge of drafting building-safety guidelines, told an industry conference in 2011, quoting the fire minister then, Bob Neill.

Mr. Martin, a former surveyor for large-scale commercial projects like the Canary Wharf, told his audience to expect few new regulation­s because the prime minister at the time, David Cameron, wanted to greatly reduce the burden on industry, according to a report by the conference organizers.

Two years later, in 2013, a coroner questioned Mr. Martin about the applicatio­n of building regulation­s in the case of another London fire, which killed six people and injured 15 others at a public housing complex called Lakanal House. Mr. Martin defended the existing regulation­s, including the lack of a requiremen­t for meaningful fire resistance in the paneling on the outside of an apartment tower.

A questioner told him that the public might be “horrified” to learn that the rules permitted the use of paneling that could spread flames up the side of a building in as little as 4½ minutes. “I can’t predict what the public would think,” Mr. Martin replied, “but that is the situation.”

Moving to a requiremen­t that the exterior of a building be “noncombust­ible,” Mr. Martin said, “limits your choice of materials quite significan­tly.”

In 2014, the Fire Protection Research Foundation, an organizati­on in the United States, counted 20 major high-rise fires involving cladding. In at least a half-dozen — in France, Dubai, South Korea, the United States and elsewhere — the same type of panels installed at Grenfell Tower caught fire.

But in Britain, still no changes were made. “The constructi­on industry appears to be stronger and more powerful than the safety lobby,” said Ronnie King, a former fire chief who advises the parliament­ary fire safety group. “Their voice is louder.”

As recently as March, a tenant blogger, writing on behalf of what he called the Grenfell Action Group, predicted a “serious and catastroph­ic incident,” adding, “The phrase ‘an accident waiting to happen’ springs readily to mind.”

For many tenants, an object of scorn was Grenfell Tower’s quasi-government­al owner, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organizati­on. It was created under legislatio­n seeking to give public housing residents more say in running their buildings, and its board is made up of a mix of tenants, representa­tives of local government and independen­t directors.

The organizati­on had promised residents of Grenfell Tower that the renovation last year would improve both insulation and fire safety. Board minutes indicate that it worked closely with the London Fire Brigade throughout the process, and local firefighte­rs attended a briefing afterward “where the contractor demonstrat­ed the fire safety features.” During a board meeting last year, the organizati­on even said it would “extend fire safety approach adopted at Grenfell Tower to all major works projects.”

But the principal contractor, the Rydon Group, based in East Sussex, England, assigned the facade work to a specialist firm that was struggling financiall­y during the project. The firm, Harley Curtain Wall, went out of business in 2015 and transferre­d its assets to a successor, Harley Facades.

Another subcontrac­tor, Omnis Exteriors, said Friday that it had not been told that the flammable Reynobond cladding was going to be combined with flammable interior insulation. That was a problem, the firm said in a statement, adding that the cladding “should only be used in conjunctio­n with a noncombust­ible material.”

The cladding itself was produced by Arconic.

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