Two Finger posted:

If I had to guess, I'd say emergency stairwells were propped open creating a nice chimney for superheated gasses to float up, flashing off everything they come into contact with.

orange juche posted:

Or the emergency stairwells had loving ventilation grilles in the doors. Who the gently caress puts a ventilation grille in a door that leads to a central chimney from floor to ceiling in the building? Those ventilation grilles would turn the escape wells from stairways into crematoria.

Smiling Jack posted:

High rise fires are usually quickly put out due to proper construction and sprinklers.

This is a shockingly bad fire.

Edit: like catastrophically, people going to jail bad

mlmp08 posted:

This fire is spreading faster than a couple of high rises that got hit by loving jetliners.

Blind Rasputin posted:

Yeah the live streams of this fire are intense. I've never seen such a large building just flat burn down without hope of being stopped before.

Smiling Jack posted:

The body count on this in gonna be bad.

redneck nazgul posted:

https://twitter.com/themarkashley/status/874849561977729025

More nightmare fuel for any first responders ITT.

quote:

The speed at which the fire spread has shaken local residents. Ubah Yusuf, who lives nearby, said she and her neighbors will speak to their building manager about the safety of their building.

"The fire started from the bottom, people on upper floors couldn't get out. I'm worried about my building now," she said. "I'm worried if a fire happens, who is going to help?"

She blamed the authorities for not coming early enough or doing enough to tackle the fire.

Another witness, Abdullah Barraq Mohidin, said the fire began as a small one "but no one left their houses."

"I can't believe that no one went inside to help them," he said. "There was people trying to break their windows ... a woman and a child waiting for people to help them for three hours. Three hours there shouting for help."

quote:

Former fire marshal Robert Rowe told CNN the fire appears to have been "moving very quickly."

He said he suspects the fire sprinkler system "was out of service or there was a malfunction at the time" based on how quickly the fire spread.

"What a fire sprinkler does, is stop it immediately, you won't have a fire of an magnitude," Rowe said. "It would stop it right there."

facialimpediment posted:

This is both surprising and not.

https://twitter.com/BraddJaffy/status/874806846103707650

Donnie really WAS entertaining the thought of firing Mueller.

Duzzy Funlop posted:

How the gently caress are there still no confirmed casualties from that residential rocket stove?

The London Fire Brigade posted:

Forty fire engines and over 200 firefighters and officers have been called to a tower block fire on the Lancaster West estate in north Kensington this morning. The brigade has received multiple calls. The fire is from the second floor to the top floor of the 27-floor building.

Assistant Commissioner Dan Daly said: “Firefighters wearing breathing apparatus are working extremely hard in very difficult conditions to tackle this fire. This is a large and very serious incident and we have deployed numerous resources and specialist appliances.“

The brigade was called at 0054 and is still at the scene. Fire crews from North Kensington, Kensington, Hammersmith and Paddington and from surrounding fire stations are in attendance. The cause of the fire is not known at this stage.

Dead Reckoning posted:

redneck nazgul posted:

https://twitter.com/themarkashley/status/874849561977729025

More nightmare fuel for any first responders ITT.

Two Finger posted:

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK that

orange juche posted:

. Glenfell was a building from the 70s and didn't have a working sprinkler system installed, because it wasn't in the fire code in the 70s for high rises to have them.

Radical 90s Wizard posted:

Like, who in the gently caress ever thought "stay in the building that's on fire" was a reasonable plan???

I mean I'm not one for mob justice, but if ever there was some motherfuckers that deserved it...

goddamnedtwisto posted:

The idea is supposed to be you stay in place. All the flats are meant to be 1-hour rated and isolated from each other which is more than enough time for the fire brigade to turn up and sort poo poo out. I know it sounds grim but there's solid thinking behind it - a lot of people won't actually try to escape a fire, and of course at any one time there are going to be people unable to escape under their own steam, so they treat the entire thing as if it's inhabited by people unable to do so as a worst-case scenario and work from there.

If they have put a flammable - or even a non-1-hour-rated - material anywhere in the building, *especially* around the outside of it, and broken the isolation between flats (say by installing a new central heating system without using fireproof insulation) this completely destroys that 1-hour rating and would almost certainly lead to, well, something that looks exactly like those pictures.

goddamnedtwisto posted:

It's not advanced technology, it's literally Victorian technology and is incredibly easy to do. Concrete or brick walls faced in gypsum, fibreglass (asbestos not so cool nowadays) plaster used to fill voids where the walls are punctured for services, hollow-core doors internally and steel-faced (or treated wood) external doors. It's how every housing block from the 1950s onwards in the UK and most of Europe was built, and they're statistically considerably safer than smaller dwellings that aren't required to have that sort of construction.

Like I say, fire exits are a complete red herring here - look at that fire, you could have the entire building made of fire exits and people would still have been trapped. Don't forget the one-hour rating also means it keeps fire in as well as out - a fire in one flat shouldn't be able to spread to any others in less than an hour.

Looking at before and after pictures I have a deep suspicion they've done what quite a lot of private redevelopments of ex-council stock have done and just clad the old exterior, and I'm willing to bet they've managed to argue that because the old exterior is concrete they don't need to make the cladding one-hour rated.