Apologies for the long silence - I've been busy trying to rescue my floundering PhD project - but I'll be working on that SOLAR DOLL'S HOUSE closing report I promised. In the meantime, I'd like to question a few of the claims I've heard made about the Grenfell Tower fire. I'm still not sure even now if I should be doing this or if I should stay silent, if this is too soon, or too agenda-driven. But as well as it being a human tragedy, and an outrage, there is a building science dimension that is relevant to comment on here. So, if you're sick of hearing about Grenfell, better stop reading now. Otherwise, please continue... Update: Find some hard facts and real accounts of what happened in The Grenfell Tower Inquiry with Eddie Mair. It is making me reconsider a few points - mostly my disbelief at how incompetent the construction industry can be... 1. "The cladding was put there to make the Tower look less unsightly to its rich neighbours." If that was true, why wasn't plain aluminium sheeting used? It would've looked the same, and wouldn't have spread the fire the way the Reynobond cladding did, with its plastic powder core. I'm not saying aesthetics should have been their first consideration - just that it doesn't stack up as a reason for the tragedy. 2. "If it weren't for eco-nutters / the EU and their stupid carbon-cutting targets, this never would have happened." It's easy to see why this statement gets made - the cladding was installed recently to improve the thermal insulation - without it, there would be no plastic powder core to catch and spread the fire all over the outside of the building. Something I'd like to know is, did the residents have to pay their own energy bills or did the landlord/housing association/someone else pay them? If they paid their own bills, it's highly likely they were suffering with the cold and damp to save money - improving building insulation often does not cut down energy usage, sometimes even having the opposite effect, where residents turn the heating up because they think they can afford to now that the building is more energy-efficient. (A proper insulation job should let you turn the heating DOWN but still remain comfortable - that's how the savings should be made - assuming you can turn the heating down from wherever it was before.) If the residents of Grenfell Tower had their bills paid for them (which doesn't seem to have been the case? This is done in some social housing blocks in Southampton, though I think it's changing), an easy way to cut carbon would've been for the management to tell all the residents to pay their own bills. Cladding needn't have come in to it. But cladding DID come to it. Which points to the fact that someone, somewhere, cared about the residents' health and comfort, and not just saving energy. I can easily believe that the people in charge were greedy or incompetent, but it actually looks like at least one of them had a heart. 3. "Fireproof cladding would have cost an extra £5000 for the whole building on top of the £8 million refurbishment." Ok, but how do the other properties of the alternative cladding compare? The thermal insulation of the FR (fire-resistant) product appears to be half as good as the PE, the stuff that was used. (www.riversidegroup.net/pdf/ReynobondBroch.pdf p.13 "R thermal resistance".) And who knows why else it might have been rejected. It seems absurd to me that any decision-maker would look at two otherwise identical products and decide £5000 wasn't worth the fire safety. Either
But until an investigation is conducted, who knows. So maybe let's wait until we have more facts before jumping to conclusions?! This is not an exhaustive dissection of all the commentary on the Grenfell Tower fire. I wouldn't know where to begin when it comes to how the residents were treated when they raised fire safety concerns before, or where they're going to be housed now, or the pressure on our emergency services. As ever, this post comes with the warning that I am not an expert in anything and have no experience in construction, fire safety, housing management or anything else. So please, pick apart my logic, educate me.
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Susan's BlogIn which I scribble words about energy, the environment, climate change, and other science things. Views expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of the CDT staff or sponsors. Archives
August 2019
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