How we may have walked asleep into the tragedy of Grenfell Tower and what it might mean for us.

The picture above was not around for long.  It was expunged less than a couple of hours later. 

I have been struck by the rapid pace of developments after the fire resembling the spectacle in the famous film which gave its name to the tragedy. The Towering Inferno. Within a week of the last flames being put out, the retribution has gathered pace and so far, seems unstoppable.

Looking at the events in recent times I am reminded of what the late great Alistair Cook said at the time of the crisis of confidence in business when so many organisations had to re-submit accounts because accusations of malpractice were tumbling in. It was, he said, like standing on the beach at the ebb tide, watching all the people standing in the sea who had been swimming with their trunks off. It was the time of the Enron scandal.

Some years ago, an electrician on a training course I delivered spoke to me over coffee about a project he worked upon in a high security prison, not too far from where I lived.  Refurbishments in such premises as these ensure, almost to the last detail, that the interned are inside for their allotted time spent at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.  It came as a shock to the project managers that they had fallen victim to “downspeccing.”

The upgrade to the prison entailed a new supply from the distribution network with a transformer supplied by a large 3 core steel wire armoured cable run in a secure trench.  The cable arrived on a reel, the driver positioned the vehicle at the point where the cable would be unwound then drawn, by winch, into the trench. The supervisor manager walked out of the site cabin, took one look at the cable. He walked away shaking his head.

It turned out that the cable was too small in cross-sectional area. The original specification with order note was produced.

In the ensuing meeting it was agreed that the driver be allowed to go. The cable was cut up into manageable lengths. The electrical sub-contractors were allowed to weigh it in for scrap. This took place at a time when the world price of copper justified its illegal removal from fixed installations, sometimes by force, which resulted in diverse events including unexpected loss of power, leading to paralysis of rail control and signalling networks. I was in such an event. I saw some views of the backwaters of Sheffield that I would imagine the local councillors would rather I had not seen.

Each of the sub-contractors walked home at the end of that week with a bonus in excess of four figures.

An erstwhile colleague of mine, as a younger man, was a victim but nearly paid for it with his life. He was a marine engineer, like me, when his vessel was in dry dock.  Some pipework on the boiler fronts had to be renewed.  The vessel was re-commissioned and during routine operations one section of the pipework ruptured, nearly killing him. Had his face been in another position the top of his head may well have been blown off. Superheated steam is uncompromising; it takes no prisoners. He got away with serious burns to his scalp which left him prematurely bald above his forehead.

The specified pipework was not fitted. A lower grade of pipework, carbon steel with a welded longitudinal seam had been used. The specified steel, known as Schedule 40, was not used. This has a minimum wall thickness of 6mm with an alloy composition giving increased tensile strength and increased corrosion resistance. Its most important attribute is that it is solid drawn from a billet.

The two anecdotes above illustrate the consequences of “downspeccing”. In one the material had to be purchased twice. In the other someone nearly paid for it with his life. Both illustrate the consequences for the high-rise blocks built in Britain, one of which had flammable material attached to its shell.

The last time I looked Britain produces 177,000,000 tonnes of waste annually. Approximate. Within this figure we find all the material that is discarded while we get along with living and doing the things that contribute to the Gross National Product.  It looks awesome but we are, with every month that passes, finding all manner of ingenious ways to recycle, reducing the impact of this massive resource, for that is what it is.

There are some enterprising people who, with ingenuity combined with intelligent application of resources, create a sustainable lifestyle living “off-grid.” This is living without using resources available from the national networks of water, electricity and gas.  For a period of about 10 years I lived “off-bin”, ensuring that all waste I produced was re-cycled 100%. With the exception of ash produced by a solid fuel stove, I took all waste to be recycled with vegetable waste going into small compost heaps used by allotment holders.

Building design, over the past 20 or so years, has had to become “sustainable”. Britain has never, in my humble opinion, got over the first energy crisis of 1973, a period that is seared into my memory like a hot poker used to inscribe dates in tree bark. The heating costs of property, housing, commercial and industrial buildings has made designers, builders use all manner of methods to ensure that the “environmental footprint” of the finished product is as small as possible.  The visual impact upon the landscape is to be found everywhere. Like vertically extended Rubic Cubes with multifaceted sides these edifices appear to stride endlessly across the familiar lines of our existence, casting curious shadows upon huddled masses in coffee joints, hastily consuming lunch, Pasta, Sushi or whatever the multicultural retail experience has to offer.  They resemble, in some of their colours, the wooden building blocks I used as a child. In some, one wonders how far the designer went in resolving Rubic’s puzzle, that being to rotate each of the planes in the cube such that all pieces of the article had the same colour across the face. It looks, in some cases, as if Professor Rubic had the last laugh.

Not that I am entirely critical of this practice. While driving through Wakefield In Yorkshire, a city with a fantastic heritage of highly decorated older buildings in neo-Baroque styles, I noticed how modern additions to the built environment used the same techniques but the colours and textures of the insulated cladding had been chosen sensibly to blend with those of the older buildings.

The race was on, in the early part of this century, to make the “Green deal” a part of the fabric of our existence. Everywhere, new build had to make this one of the goals of the project. An environmentally neutral building that, once completed, would consume no more energy than a large house might have done in times past.

This seemed to be working. Until now.

As a working engineer I have spent many fascinating hours speaking to many people who did interesting work. One was a sales representative I met while setting up a purchase contact for a location I worked in at the time.  He told me of a prominent lubricating oil whose name I cannot mention but which is ubiquitous in the DIY cupboards, sheds and tool boxes in many houses, flats, apartments, like to refuges in which we live while not out earning a crust. He said that the petro-chemical industry had a problem with paraffin waxes (PARem AFFINis; Latin for little affinity) which are huge long chain molecules, by-products from more lucrative production processes. He went on to explain that the wax was used (recycled) by the addition of a diluent which made it fluid. This was sold as lubricating oil to solve all household problems where such a product might be needed. The trouble was the diluent. It was volatile. Over a long period it evaporated leaving behind the very material that, by its nature, would do the worst damage to the mechanism which had presented the problem in the first instance.

Take one look at the catalogue of chemicals in any sun lotion, tanning lotion, sun blocker. Then look at anything that has “benzo-“ in its name.  Like Paraffins, complex benzene derivatives are made less harmless to be recycled into household products. 

Tower blocks looked like the solutions to the “housing problems” of years ago but looking at this now, I wonder how much of this was perceived rather than real. The architects of the day are now held up to ridicule and vilification for the dreadful and monstrous constructions that elevated bad design to a questionable priesthood. For all that they seemed to “solve” the housing problems that looked like inadequate construction, it is a fact that the “two-up two-down” terraced town house was a better build, a better “module” for living than anything the modern construction industry can throw up now. There is a department in a northern university which has built one of these in a laboratory. The intent of the research is to establish how best to conserve, use, heat, and occupy such property for the simple reason that this design still forms a huge percentage of the housing stock. Its demolition now would create a massive addition to the figure I quoted earlier. While I am prepared to accept that the brick mass is re-cyclable and the wood from floors, beams, joists, roofs is a feedstock for biomass it is too costly a venture. Especially so in these times when landfill capacity diminishes with every month that passes.

On Friday of last week a colleague told me that a scaffolder friend had been inundated with enquiries connected with pricing for tower blocks. The envisaged work was the total removal of cladding fitted as part of the intent to reduce the size of the building’s carbon footprint.  I can imagine every stockyard of every scaffolder stripped of poles and clamps, while hastily loaded vehicles move on the nation’s highways anxious to deliver the means to achieve, once again, the objective of the “green deal” as other vehicles, similarly powered, strive to remove that which has been discredited as a consequence of events in London.

Was there ever a situation more ridiculous.

I need not highlight the many who will “clean up” on this one.  Not the least of which will be the legal profession who will know all the answers to the questions they will ask in court. 

Following the events, two things have emerged after the analysis of the material used for the cladding. One, that patently flammable material was added to some building exteriors. The second is that the original analyses, intended to quantify flammability as well as flame retarding properties available at the time, may not have been sufficiently stringent.

Without entering into too much detail there is also the possibility that the cladding, inadequate as it may have been, was not installed in the manner that would have prevented vertical fire spread. Another part of this story is that some affected by the fire were treated for cyanide poisoning. Cyanates, Iso-cyanates and similar chemicals have long been in use. Carbon and Nitrogen are harmless on their own but combined in this deadly bond are lethal to the human condition.

It is not clear as yet how much of the suspect insulating material is a re-cycled product. To illustrate my point about recycling of potentially harmful substances I need only quote Asbestos. While it may have been banned in new build from the mid-1970’s white Asbestos, Chrysotile, still turns up in some modern products. Simply because it is white.

One college I attended years ago had a concrete tower block. Built in the manner of the brute architecture of the time, it resembled the Monolith from the famous film, 2001; a Space Odyssey, but with less of the subtlety. Some liked it. Others found it useful only on hot sunny days as a provision of shade on the “quadrangle.” In a program of renewal the college had to think about what to do with this relic of architectural nihilism, built in the period when Brezhnev walked with his thugs all over the simple aspirations of the Czech government under Dubcek. They chose, rightly I think, to clad it. It now leaps off the ground like some colourful avenging angel frozen in aspic or clear amber.  But they did avoid the punitive landfill charges, dubbed by some as the modern equivalent of Rummage and Scroungage. 

We require a better understanding of what it really means for us if we attempt to pass ourselves off as “green” consumers, claiming the dubious credit accordingly. A better and more informed relationship has to exist with the materials we use.  Asbestos is a naturally occurring product. What are we doing to it that makes it so dangerous?

Most householders in Britain are in for a nasty shock when they begin to feel the financial impact of waste disposal on their wallets.

But most of all, if the high-rise method of housing is to stay, we need to re-learn methods of living in these spaces and how to construct them to avoid re-occurrences. Good architecture is not expensive. It becomes expensive when many were built with borrowed money and were torn down well before the end of their anticipated lives but they were also built at a time when landfill was plentiful and free.

“Downspeccing” WILL occur in ALL future designs.

There have been a few remarks about the possibility of power surges (Transient Over-voltages is the correct terminology) that may have caused domestic equipment to self-incinerate.  I have left speculation about this out of the article for the best of reasons; I know why it happens, what the causes might be but commenting on it here would be a fool’s mission.

It is a fact that the first to alert the fire services were some of the Asian community, up and about because it was Ramadan.

From my notes of years ago I learned that a fire had to be brought under control no more than 15 minutes after its initiation. It was a possibility then, as it is to me now, that the chances of defeating it reduced by 50% with every minute that passed after that point.

In the official enquiry after the incident off Zeebrugge when the Herald of Free Enterprise capsized in 1987, one of the vessel designers was dismissed as “rambling and unconvincing.” I have the document. I hope that those charged with improving matters have their best mental attributes at their command. They will be needed.