Grenfell Tower
IOSH: Grenfell inquiry must be fire safety ‘watershed’
The Grenfell Tower public inquiry must be “a watershed for fire safety”, the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) has claimed.
The news follows the government’s announcement of the terms of reference for the inquiry.
Prime minister Theresa May said she accepted in full the recommendations by inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick for what it should consider, following a public consultation.
IOSH said it had submitted a response to the consultation as well as contribution to one of the open meetings. It said many of the areas the institution had recommended for examination had been included, such as causation, design and construction, regulation, compliance and resourcing.
Independent review
The institution also noted an independent review of building regulations and fire safety, previously announced by the Prime Minister, will help to inform the work of the inquiry.
The review will be led by ex-Health and Safety Executive chair Dame Judith Hackitt, in a move that IOSH described as ‘an important step’.
Vital watershed
Richard Jones, head of policy and public affairs at IOSH, said: “It’s vital that this inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire becomes a watershed for fire safety and helps prevent future tragedies.
“Agreeing these terms of reference will help ensure key areas of weakness are examined and enable the chair to make the necessary recommendations to improve both current and future fire risk management.”
Moore-Bick now intends to hold a preliminary hearing in mid-September and to provide an initial report by Easter 2018, dealing with the cause of the fire and the means by which it spread to the whole building.
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IOSH: Grenfell inquiry must be fire safety ‘watershed’
The news follows the government's announcement of the terms of reference for the inquiry.
James Evison
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Surely the issue of a comprehensive enquiry into the Grenfell Tower tragedy needs to reach much deeper into UK regulation, its application and its control.
This time it was a fire, next time it could be a repeat of Ronan Point or even a total tower collapse. And as a Society we will be continue to chase shadows.
Reducing the process to zeroing in upon a narrow range of shortcomings and sandbagging those deemed at fault is really only part of the British blame culture.
Once this process is dragged out and justice dispensed, we can then all heave a sigh of relief. And a massive opportunity to salvage something of benefit from the wreckage will have been missed.
Is it not time to look carefully at the lowest tender price system? Is there not a direct link between all the elements of competetive pricing, vague and ill-managed regulation, quality of goods and services bought in to meet the price and the overall system of supervision? Or rather lack of supervision?
Grenfell Tower has revealed catastrophic failure at so many levels of British society. We can only marvel at the courage of shortchanged firemen, the humanity and generous response of ordinary citizens and the humility of survivors.
Let us all hope that the Great and the Good now being assembled to put the lid on this affair can scrape up some of the guts shown by those of our fellow Countrymen and -women touched by the enormity of this disaster.
Some key issues that may need to be flagged.
1) Aluminium reacts with water to produce hydrogen at c.700 deg.C the metal is molten & reaction is explosive
2) water used on metal heated by fire – forms an insulating layer of steam which compromises the cooling effect
3) many lives would have been save if the exit route via the stairs and places of safety on each floor had been ‘clean air’. In other ‘hostile atmosphere’ conditions the clean air zones are slightly pressurised to keep them clean – this needs to be investigated as a retro fit to high rise blocks with emergency doors opening in to the clean air space having pressure release valves so that thes doors can be opened but then close with the added assistance of air pressure to seal them.
4) places of safety on each floor of public buildings could be toilets, as these have to have airlock doors – the extractor fans used could be replaced by vents and a low pressure feed taken from external ‘clean’ air to the airlock with vents in the inside door taking the cleansing airflow out via the toilet and sealing the outside door against smoke ingress
5) the lack of damage to the roof area indicates a key route to and place of safety in that fire
6) how often does any such building have a full evacuation fire drill (as opposed to an alarm test)?
7) how are dry and wet risers checked and verified ( I have a case of a failure in planning process that saw dry (fire) risers installed (as approved by planners and Fire service) in a place where the appliances could not be brought in to connect to them. I’ve also had a situation where the sprinkler system was pressure locked (and would not work if a bulb burst) due to a variation of mains pressure after a maintenance shut-down.
8) just as the new technology of factory panel building ran into the traditional building culture (where high redundancy allowed the omission of bricks, mortar etc without ill effects) the delivery of rain screen cladding has seen those actually installing the system adapting and modifying the system without the knowledge to do this properly. There are I believe many stone clad buildings with exactly the same time bomb of the ‘chimney’ void between cladding and main walls, and the main walls with ‘leakage’ causing the water the intentionally can pass through gaps between cladding panels to then permeate into the building fabric. The solution applied by ill informed builders was to seal or mortar-point the joints in the cladding. I suspect also that the fire breaks (which have to be active (intumescent ) rather than passive) might equally be ineffective on those buildings.
As an engineer working over some 50 years over many fields in transport and buildings services, I find this an area where there is great scope for cross-discipline working to deliver hazard removal and risk management. Happy to discuss further.
The government are to blame for the Grenfell Tower Fire because they steadfastly refused to take the advice of their own all-party health and safety committee over many years about updating the Approved document b fire regulations Regulations 4 housing Ministers and the department for communities ignored their advice. If they had updated the fire regulations then the fire in Grenfell would never have happenedThe warnings were sent by the all-party parliamentary group on fire safety, a group of MPs which campaigns for better protection against blazes.
Shockingly, one of the ministers replied to the group say he had ‘neither seen nor heard anything’ that would suggest the all-party group’s demands – such as the introduction of sprinkler systems – were urgent.
Stephen Williams, a former Liberal Democrat MP who was local government minister at the time, said bringing forward the changes would ‘disrupt’ his department.
Nothing was done to address fire safety in tower blocks and just two months ago, the all-party group wrote a letter to warn: ‘It is now time to listen’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4619722/FOUR-government-ministers-warned-fire-regulations.html#ixzz4uClwXrNZ
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