[SystemSafety] Electrical Safety, Fire Safety

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2017-06-16 16:42 , Mike Ellims wrote:
> From what I've seen on various media sources the chimney effect appears to
> be consideration.
Wow! Peter's note really opened up something new for me.

I know that windows are typically moved to the front of the cladding, but in Germany the cladding is
attached directly to the (former) facade of the building. As the Guardian letter from Mitcham said,
this leads to ventilation and condensation problems. I guess this may be partially alleviated
through the mineral-wool construction technique, but I don't know.

We discussed the Grenfell Tower disaster in the RVS group meeting today. The safety topics were
expanded from those I came in with to these:

1. Cladding. Apparently it has now been confirmed that the cladding was the polymer variety, which
is prohibited on German buildings higher than can be reached by fire-service turntable ladders.
2. Emergency Exit pathways (what should there be, and how protected?)
3. Smoke/fire alarms (how should they be installed and behave? In particular, should they
necessarily be networked in a large building?)
4. Extinguisher technology (Sprinklers, but also lower-tech, lower-cost, more-immediate solutions to
hand)
5. Fire barriers (an issue in the Lakanal House fire apparently, and again an issue through Peter
B's observations)
6. Electrical safety
7. Access for fire services and their equipment. In Germany, I understand there must be special
access paths for fire services to large buildings, which paths are equipped with risers to which
they may attach hoses at frequent points).

As with many tragic, visible but rare events, there seems to be high pressure to draw conclusions
rapidly. There is the "couldn't happen here" brigade, praising stronger regulation (disclaimer: I
don't know whether I am one of these or not). But there is a need for inexpensive but comfortable
housing, and perfect safety is not cheap (I've seen no costing so far of sprinkler installation in
such a building as Grenfell Towers, but it can't be inexpensive). And the rarity of the event must
come into consideration - this is, as far as I can tell (and I admit that is not very far), a tragic
event with some major characteristics without clear precedent (which is not to deny that there is
plenty of justified-in-retrospect "we told you so last year" commentary.)

The government will inevitably draw criticism for not having followed through on its commitment to
investigate fire safety regulations in large residential buildings after the Lakanal House coroner's
verdict and its promise to do so. Some of that criticism is justified (a promise not kept), but
there are difficult issues. What exactly is the right attitude towards safety versus price and
convenience? Would we expect such an investigation to have told us definitively? What if the local
council had said to the residents a couple of years ago "sorry, giving you perfect fire protection
is more than we can afford, so we'd like you to move to ..... Rhyl"? (The point being that Rhyl is a
very nice place, but it is not London and it is by no means clear that people would choose to move
to a nice but foreign place to potentially increase their personal safety.) What of people who
complain about the rents one year, and about the lack of expensive safety measures the next? How
should society handle such interconnected issues? These seem to me to be hard questions without
obvious solution. Gosh, politics is hard. I'm glad I stuck to engineering.

But what a tragedy! Surely just "sticking to the engineering" is a cop-out? No set of regulations is
perfect. Are there any solutions to the safety issues of living in large, high buildings that are
not almost-prohibitively expensive?

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Bielefeld, Germany
MoreInCommon
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs-bi.de





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