The Grenfell Tower fire

Mimi wrote:

Freedom wrote:The link about the alleged fraudster that Chrissie posted on 29th June has now gone. Here's another one.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/30/grenfell-fraudster-faked-family-death-get-10000-two-weeks-court/?WT.mc_id=tmg_share_fbl

My goodness - he looks untrustworthy.

Not as bad as Paget-Brown, imho!

This is distraction. Kensington and Chelsea Council will be flailing around desperately trying to find 'fall guys'. Anything to deflect from them and particularly deflect onto individuals. Not saying this is wrongful.

In the general scheme of things this is small fry. Heck, I don't even believe what is in the papers any more particularly in the wake of huge scandals.

When will we see prosecutions of any of the chief honchos? The ones who, imo, were not only were greedy and corrupt but also failed to ensure adequate safety resulting in a huge loss of life?

Judging by Hillsborough, in about 30 years' time, Poster. Judging by Orgreave, perhaps never.

Why d'you think May has appointed Moore-Bick, the judge already accused of 'social cleansing of the poor' following a previous judgment (overturned by the Supreme Court).

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/uk_5954a6a9e4b05c37bb7bf1a4/amp

Amazing that all those council officials at Kensington and Chelsea who are paid for by the tax-payer couldn't get their act together and decide who was living in the tower and who wasn't...not that difficult.

From the sounds of it some of the tenants were quite vocal about their concerns (completely understandably) and Kensington and Chelsea council were greedy, useless and pathetic.
....
Yes, of course leopards don't change their spots. Chinless wonder Paget whatever will run around like a chicken without a head and the media will fixate on individual bumbling fraudsters etc....

Stuff that ...... look into Kensington and Chelsea Council...

IMO only.

Dee Coy wrote:Judging by Hillsborough, in about 30 years' time, Poster. Judging by Orgreave, perhaps never.

Why d'you think May has appointed Moore-Bick, the judge already accused of 'social cleansing of the poor' following a previous judgment (overturned by the Supreme Court).

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/uk_5954a6a9e4b05c37bb7bf1a4/amp

Teresa May - ghastly.

Tony Blair - ghastly.

Do you know what this is all about GREED.

Madeleine McCann case - all about GREED.

Stupid arrogant people. No moral fibre at all.

poster wrote:Amazing that all those council officials at Kensington and Chelsea who are paid for by the tax-payer couldn't get their act together and decide who was living in the tower and who wasn't...not that difficult.

From the sounds of it some of the tenants were quite vocal about their concerns (completely understandably) and Kensington and Chelsea council were  greedy, useless and pathetic.
....
Yes, of course leopards don't change their spots. Chinless wonder Paget whatever will run around like a chicken without a head and the media will fixate on individual bumbling fraudsters etc....

Stuff that ...... look into Kensington and Chelsea Council...

IMO only.

From what I have heard, the reason why it is so difficult to find out who lived in the tower was because there was illegal subletting going on, with people who had got the tenancy of the flat not living in it, and renting it out to make a nice, fat profit.

When I worked for a council promotion was offered to those who never made a mistake. In my opinion, the people who never made mistakes did as little work as possible, ignored potential problems, and spent what little time they did work laying a paper trail proving that nothing was ever their fault. Did I also mention how decisions were avoided by claiming "it would set a precedent"? I still feel that is the case whenever I contact any council, no one is ever willing to make a decision.

I feel the whole philosophy of public service needs to change, there needs to be reward for doing things, for raising heads above the parapet, for saying "I believe we need to look at this again".

Maybe part of the answer is to increase pay, at the lower levels. When staff could earn more shelf stacking at ASDA, it means the council is staffed by ASDA rejects. Is that really who we want dealing with day to day queries, or making decisions about what needs to be passed up for a decision?

It will be interesting to see who actually made the decision to ignore the residents concerns, I wonder whether some of the paperwork will be missing?

It will be interesting to see who actually made the decision to ignore the residents concerns, I wonder whether some of the paperwork will be missing?

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I am sure it will be.

At my most cynical I wonder whether this is 'social cleaning' at play? Why did the chinless wonder incredibly thick and useless officials at Kensington and Chelsea think it was okay to ignore perfectly legitimate concerns about fire safety in a high rise block? What arrogance! What a repulsive attitude. Really bad.

This is not to do with immigration....it's to do with greed, backhanders and a cavalier attitude from council workers who are not the brightest bulbs in the block.....

I suspect the concerns did not get passed up to the people at the top.

The fire concerns were raised when the refurbishment was done, so the emails/letters would have been passed to the person who was supervising that contract. That person would have checked that the refurb had been done as per contract, then binned the letter. That person would have been a very low paid clerk, who was paid to keep any problems from being escalated upwards. That is how many complaints staff see their job, their job is to stop the complaint.

When residents complained to the fire service about the parking of cars blocking exit routes, the complaint was referred to the council, who deal with parking under the decriminalised parking laws. The problem is, obstruction has been left to the police, who often don't know that, and only the police could have ticketed cars obstructing the fire escapes.

That raises the question whether the police can assess whether an escape route is being obstructed by cars, are they qualified? I don't believe they are, but the fire service can't issue parking tickets.

What it needed was the fire services to contact the police, and act together. Probably for every tower block in the country.


The reason why there are no sprinklers in tower blocks owned by councils is because they are invariably set off as a "joke". Smoke detectors in individual flats are likely to go off because little johnny is smoking in the toilet, hoping mum won't notice because she is burning the toast, so evacuating the whole block when smoke detectors go off is not feasible - especially as some teenager would realise their "power" and keep setting them off just to see the chaos. My daughter's school had a time when the fire alarm was being set off three, four times a day, it was the best joke ever in year 7, and only exclusions for the culprits stopped it. The school could do that, they had CCTV and the kids were not good at forming a large group around the culprit. The older ones would have been almost impossible to "get", they know how to obscure the cameras.


It is like the lifts in some blocks of flats, they are vandalised within 24 hours of being repaired, and it feels pointless to keep trying to repair them. It is pointless.

So, I don't think anyone did anything malicious. They used the warmer cladding, which was permitted by the law, to get the "green" badges for the building, they left out the sprinklers found on more expensive, owner occupied flats as they were likely to be activated as a prank.

mumof6 wrote:I suspect the concerns did not get passed up to the people at the top.

The fire concerns were raised when the refurbishment was done, so the emails/letters would have been passed to the person who was supervising that contract. That person would have checked that the refurb had been done as per contract, then binned the letter. That person would have been a very low paid clerk, who was paid to keep any problems from being escalated upwards. That is how many complaints staff see their job, their job is to stop the complaint.

When residents complained to the fire service about the parking of cars blocking exit routes, the complaint was referred to the council, who deal with parking under the decriminalised parking laws. The problem is, obstruction has been left to the police, who often don't know that, and only the police could have ticketed cars obstructing the fire escapes.

That raises the question whether the police can assess whether an escape route is being obstructed by cars, are they qualified? I don't believe they are, but the fire service can't issue parking tickets.

What it needed was the fire services to contact the police, and act together. Probably for every tower block in the country.

The reason why there are no sprinklers in tower blocks owned by councils is because they are invariably set off as a "joke". Smoke detectors in individual flats are likely to go off because little johnny is smoking in the toilet, hoping mum won't notice because she is burning the toast, so evacuating the whole block when smoke detectors go off is not feasible - especially as some teenager would realise their "power" and keep setting them off just to see the chaos. My daughter's school had a time when the fire alarm was being set off three, four times a day, it was the best joke ever in year 7, and only exclusions for the culprits stopped it. The school could do that, they had CCTV and the kids were not good at forming a large group around the culprit. The older ones would have been almost impossible to "get", they know how to obscure the cameras.

It is like the lifts in some blocks of flats, they are vandalised within 24 hours of being repaired, and it feels pointless to keep trying to repair them. It is pointless.

So, I don't think anyone did anything malicious. They used the warmer cladding, which was permitted by the law, to get the "green" badges for the building, they left out the sprinklers found on more expensive, owner occupied flats as they were likely to be activated as a prank.

I hear what you are saying and agree with you up to a point but what happened was still unacceptable. We have very strict fire regulations in this country and there was no excuse for this. It is not acceptable to blame it on the residents and what they may or may not have done.

I think the reasons for what happened are to do with money. Sorry - but it boils down to greed. No doubt there were many absentee landlords and quite likely overcrowding of apartments.

If you look into the Grenfell Tower residents complaints you can see they go right back. Their concerns were ignored and they were bullied by the management committee. In my opinion, there WAS malice - on the part of the council and the management of the block.

With slightly better education young people can learn about risks and consequences - especially if they are obliged to face the consequences of their behaviour. In other words, if they set off alarms/sprinklers they are obliged to clear up the mess and/or get fined or face other negative consequences (eg: everyone avoids them because they are idiots and have endangered other people or made other people's lives uncomfortable).

I was quite naughty at school or would have been if I could have got away with it. On the few occasions where I did something antisocial I was held to account, shamed, and made to clean up the mess. Guess how many times this happened? Twice. Once at each school. What I did was not cool and I was made to face the consequences and look stupid by my peers.

There is a line of command in organisations.  The tax-payer picks up the bill for the salaries and the state workers should be accountable. It is not good enough to blame the victims who have ultimately paid with their lives. What has happened to the bureaucrats?

ETA: How come most councils in London at any rate are so good at handing out tickets and indeed getting a car clamped and removed? This can happen in a very short space of time and has nothing to do with blocking emergency routes.

I would say a culture of negligence within the so-called 'management' of the block pretty much sums up what happened and what lead to this catastrophe.


https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/grenfell-tower-the-kctmo-culture-of-negligence/

To do anything about antisocial behaviour you have to prove who did it, the law requires proof.

So, there was a group of 20 kids in hoodies hanging around in a dense group, and one of the 18 grey hoodies set off the alarm. Then they all scarpered.

Do we get the police to interview all 20, take statements, and attempt to work out which one it was that set off the sprinklers? And send them off to court, where the magistrates will do precisely nothing? In an atmosphere where the police have been told to stop "criminalising" young people, and therefore won't even take theft and assault further? Is it really worth spending hundreds of hours of police time to achieve nothing?

Or do we fit every idiot 12 year old with a criminal record, and blight their future? The answer is somewhere between the "ignore them, they are kids" which is currently being done, and the "shove them all in prison" - but that answer lies with the voters, who have to let the politicians know what sort of society they want.

Would these kids be stopped by the prospect of prison? Does the prospect of prison stop them using knives on each other? Are the kids who carry knives, intending to use them, really going to accept that setting off a fire alarm is naughty?

I personally feel that part of the answer involves spending more money on our teenagers, having high quality pupil referral units, high quality alternative provision schools, high quality social services support, high quality mental health support. Teenagers don't vote, so there are targets for the maximum waiting time for adult mental health, but none for children's, the NHS will happily leave children in distress waiting for months. My own, suicidal, daughter waited 5, almost 6, months for the initial screening appointment to check whether she was at risk. Then she was found not to be, because she had not done anything about her threats for 6 months. No wonder the initial screening appointment could be done over the phone!

The councils can do precisely nothing about the low-grade, constant vandalism of their properties. They can't even get the money back when tenants cause thousands of pounds worth of damage to their house, because the tenants are on benefits and own nothing.

As for ignoring the fears of the tenants: whenever council houses are refurbished there is a lot of anger and a massive volume of complaints. People hate having someone else tell them what day the work will be done, and what will be done, it is their home, and they want control of what happens, and the current system does not allow that. Therefore, they find something to complain about that sounds better than "I want the new kitchen arranged differently", or "I don't want the mess on little Johnny's birthday" maybe "the new kitchen extractor is a safety hazard". That is normal, even in the best organised refurbishment programs, because people are territorial about their space. When the council refurbishes an estate, they make all the kitchens/bathrooms the same. People have lived in those houses for 50 years, and hate having a new bathroom imposed, it is their home.

I wonder how many complaints the council had about the refurbishment, and how many were about fire risk? I suspect a fairly small proportion of the whole number.

I would also guess that there was a reason that the fire exit from the fourth floor was closed when the refurbishment was done, and I would guess our old friend "antisocial behaviour" had a lot to do with it, sadly.


Please don't think that I feel what is happening is right, I don't. I do feel that the constant cutting of children's services is stupid. I am involved with alternative provision, where teenagers who would have been excluded from schools go to an alternative provision school for a time, to get help and support until they can cope back at school.

The school is expensive, per child. The whole school, per year, probably costs less than keeping one person in prison. So, it really does not have to have a high success rate to be a massive cost saver, long term. It does work for some of the kids, the vast majority come out with at least the required pass in English and Maths, the qualification that gives them some home of a decent job, and all have a job/college place when they leave at age 16.

Ignoring our children and young adults, taking away their future, works out very expensive long term, especially in a climate of "they are children, so can't be punished" while at the same time going for a policy "they don't vote, so cut all services, including spending on education".

Read point 23 on page 27 of this 2012 Grenfell Tower risk assessment.

I can't copy and past the entire page but I would say it is pretty damning.



https://grenfellactiongroup.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/grenfell-tower-fire-risk-assessment-nov-2012.pdf

It appears there is a history of power surges in Grenfell Tower, with electrical appliances smoking and also catching on fire dating back to 2013. Residents concerns appear to have been downplayed.


We had another objective in mind when writing this piece. It was to chronicle the history of complacency, negligence and incompetence that has defined the RBKC and KCTMO for as long as we can remember. We had enough evidence in our possession to begin making that case and we believe it was vitally important to begin the task of recording it in the hope that those tasked with investigating the causes of the Grenfell Tower inferno would be forced to investigate this history and would be unable to ignore or bury it.

https://grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/grenfell-tower-the-kctmo-culture-of-negligence/

poster wrote:Read point 23 on page 27 of this 2012 Grenfell Tower risk assessment.

I can't copy and past the entire page but I would say it is pretty damning.



https://grenfellactiongroup.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/grenfell-tower-fire-risk-assessment-nov-2012.pdf

Would any of that have made any difference?

I suppose it tells us that the councils don't monitor their contractors properly. We know that, they want to save money, so they get the legal responsibility outsourced, and tick the box... done that. They forget that the legal responsibility remains with them, so when I have a problem with a council service the first thing our council switchboard tells me to do is to ring the private company. I refuse, every time, and point out the LEGAL responsiblity, and the failure, lies with them, it seems to come as a great surprise to them.

Is that malicious? I don't think so, it is human, taking the easy way out, forgetting about things once the box has been ticked, going on to the next pressing problem.

Is it malicious when the private company does the job badly? Sometimes, I suppose, but mainly, I think it is quotes that underestimated the job that needed to be done, which means that the company will go bust if they do the job properly, so they start cutting corners. Again, human, no one wants to lose their job.

mumof6 wrote: [...] Again, human, no one wants to lose their job.

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And no one wants to lose their life ....

I cant put my finger on why ,but I do feel there was more going on than the one fridge freezer,how it got to be so bad joyce1938

I don't understand why the cladding used on the outside had not be rigorously tested to assess its flammability? Surely this is very basic stuff?

I note that the lower three floors of the block were not private apartments. They were home to, among others, Grenfell Boxing Club and Grenfell Nursery. I presume at least some of the children and young people using these would have been living in Grenfell Tower? I wonder where these have been rehoused, if anywhere? How many of the children and young people using these might have tragically perished in the fire I wonder?

Very little information of this nature is leaking out so I presume there is some sort of press restriction in place, one would hope to spare the feelings of the families of the victims rather than to cover-up the true scale of the disaster and the level of human tragedy involved.

I have a feeling ,that I read that those places were not in use at this time.joyce1938

joyce1938 wrote:I have a feeling ,that I read that those places were not in use at this time.joyce1938

http://www.kctmo.org.uk/files/100428_kctmo_rydon_grenfell_tower_newsletter_may_2016_vff.pdf

This seems unlikely because according to the Grenfell Tower newsletter of May 2016 they were both newly refurbished and opened in the Spring/Summer of last year on the lower floors of the tower. There was also a community room available for rent plus the children's playground was improved.

If both the nursery and boxing club were up and running at the time of the fire then it would be very obvious indeed which of the children and young people who lived in the tower had died or been injured in the fire.

According to the newsletter Rydon - the cladders - were leaving the site in May 2016 and there was a 12 month guarantee on their work. Any defects reported would be repaired free of charge under the guarantee.

From the newsletter:

The ‘stay put’ fire policy
The smoke detection systems have been upgraded and extended. The Fire Brigade has asked us to
reinforce the message that, if there is a fire which is not inside your own home, you are generally safest
to stay put in your home to begin with; the Fire Brigade will arrive very quickly if a fire is reported.
The only reason you should leave your home is if the fire is inside your home. In this case you and your
family should leave the flat immediately: close your door behind you, leave the building and call the 999,
giving your address and postcode.
If there is a fire in the block near your flat, and you believe you are at risk and would prefer to evacuate
the building, then please do so using the stairs and wait outside the building for the Fire Brigade to
arrive.



I feel very sorry for the fire brigade because how could they have possibly known that the cladding on the outside of the building was so flammable? I will never forget walking past dozens and dozens of firefighters that fateful day as they took a break at around 6pm when the fire was still not completely extinguised. Not one single one would make eye contact. It was obvious that what they had seen and experienced was a tragedy of monumental proportions.

http://www.kctmo.org.uk/files/100428_kctmo_rydon_grenfell_tower_newsletter_may_2016_vff.pdf

I'm just going to watch this report from a familiar name.

That broke my heart

Did you copy the video from the Patreon site, Freedom? Sonia removed other references to it at 11.20 this morning. The Sunday Mirror are doing a piece on it tomorrow and want it to be exclusive to themselves. Presumably it'll be publicly available again tomorrow.

How strange. I got it from her Facebook page and it's still there now.

https://www.facebook.com/sonia.poulton