A tragic fire in Kensington, London

Abstract

________________________________________________________________________________________________________ A tragic fire in Kensington, LondonThe catastrophic conflagration that started at around 1 am on Wednesday 14 June, 1 apparently because of a refrigerator catching fire on the 4th floor of the 24-story building, Grenfell Tower, resulted in a very heavy loss of life, perhaps over a hundred people. The fire rapidly spread upwards, igniting most of the rest of the building, due to inflammable panels having been fitted to the exterior walls. Tower blocks are generally designed in such a way to ensure that fire starting in such a way-due to some defective electrical appliance, for exampleremains confined, perhaps to a single room or, at worst, to a single apartment (for example, each individual apartment has a fireproof door in the main entrance). Were this not so, presumably no one would wish to live or work in such block and they would never be occupied. In case of fire, residents in the rest of the building are typically advised to remain in their apartments, because it is highly likely that the fire can be extinguished, if necessary by the emergency services, before it is able to spread. Only in the case of an extraordinary event, such as a fuel-laden aeroplane colliding with the side of a skyscraper, as happened on 11 September 2001 at the World Trade Center in New York City, is the entire building destroyed. The Grenfell Tower fire is the worst tower block fire ever to happen in the UK.Grenfell Tower was built in 1974 and is owned by the local authority-the Council of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC). Its management had been outsourced to an organization called Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization (KCTMO), which collected rent from the tenants and was responsible for repairs. A refurbishment programme costing 8.6 million GBP had been completed in 2016. A major part of the refurbishment was the installation of external cladding, mainly for cosmetic purposes, but also to improve thermal insulation. The cladding was partly made of an organic polymer-variously stated to be polyethylene, polyester and polystyrene-and hence was inflammable, vitiating the principle of fire compartmentalization.Residents had complained about many aspects of the building during the preceding years. These complaints were mostly channelled through the Grenfell Action Group. Electrical power surges were known to occur, perhaps due to faulty wiring engendering short circuits, constituting an obvious fire hazard. Natural gas was piped throughout the entire building, and following the refurbishment the main pipes rose through the sole stairwell, in the middle of the building, and were not specially fireproofed. It is not clear whether there was a central fire alarm system and whether it was working.During the coming weeks and months, painstaking forensic work will doubtless uncover many details and perhaps provide more definitive knowledge regarding the origin of the fire and its extraordinarily rapid spr...

The dilemma of regulation

“…24. 20 The failures adumbrated in the previous section can be largely ascribed to inadequate capacity of the communication channels connecting the elements of the system. After that comes possible inadequacy of the information processing capability of the elements for dealing with whatever information is received through the channels.…”

“…corruption are to be found. The tragic Grenfell Tower fire [20] has, thanks to the effort of the enquiry being chaired by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, resulted in the discovery of many definite examples. Not only did the actual building regulations permit the use of flammable cladding on residential tower blocks, but checks on the cladding actually used were virtually nonexistent, which doubtless emboldened the builders to substitute cheaper and even more flammable materials than those specified, pocketing the difference in cost.…”

“…19 A cost:benefit ratio would seem to be amenable to quantitative measurement, but the powerful methodology of the Jvalue [25] is eschewed in favour of a somewhat vague qualitative approach that puts great emphasis on "indicators". 20 The goal of measurement is, of course, to make the regulation better and, to be sure, the ultimate criterion of "better" is indeed the fulfilment of some societal goal, as 1 6 Daily Telegraph (18 February 2020). 1 7 Reported by B. Marlow in the Daily Telegraph (14 July 2020).…”

Freedom and market failure

“…In this regard there is a great difference between the UK and continental Europe, with apartment blocks being the norm in the latter. They have an unhappy history in the UK; e.g., most recently the Grenfell Tower fire [8], and are often genuinely unattractive places to live. For apartment blocks to be successful there needs to be a radical reassessment of urban living [9], with every effort made to renew the attraction of cities.…”