[SystemSafety] Fire tests on Panelling

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

According to The Guardian today, cladding from 60 residential high-rises have now been tested and
all 60 have failed whatever fire test is being used.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/25/revealed-60-towers-across-england-found-to-have-unsafe-cladding

The newspaper does not say to what standards the cladding is being tested.

I just looked up British standards using the keyword search "building fire safety" on the BSI WWW
site and found BS 8414-2:2015+A1:2017 Fire performance of external cladding systems. Test method for
non-loadbearing external cladding systems fixed to and supported by a structural steel frame. It has
a release date of 2017-06-23, last Friday. That must refer to A1, since the date of the standard is
2015. So it does look as though A1:2017 was added as a result of the Grenfell Tower fire.

It costs £116. Half that if you are a BSI member. It's twenty pages long. Anyone know what it says?

I don't know about British standards in particular, but many standards have a transition time after
a new edition during which the older edition and the new edition are both valid. This raises the
possibility that the older version (from 2005) and the new standard (2015) were both valid into
2016. It also could be that the 2015 standard is more stringent than the 2005 standard, and that
many buildings clad with material that satisfied the 2005 standard might not satisfy the 2015
standard (and, one might suppose, its A1 supplement even less). That might in turn account for some
of the apparent public confusion over whether standards were satisfied. This is all speculation on
my part since I haven't read the standard and don't know what tests were conducted end of last week.

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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