[SystemSafety] Fire tests on Panelling

[Dominey, Alan (UK)]

What beats me is that they would use Aluminium at all, in the first place . . .

It is, after all, itself flammable (hence the MoT requires huge amounts of fire lagging on aluminium hulled marine passenger vessels) . . .

It is, inherently, subject to corrosion in it's raw state.

Why would you not make the panels out of a rigid, fire resistant material with a stainless steel foil coating, surely a more suitable solution  ? ? ?


Of course, we all know the real reason.  The same reason all items are designed to require specialist repair or total replacement within a few years.
Pure greed at the top of the pile by the same greedy b******s that fund all political parties . . .


And people call me cynical . . .





-----Original Message-----
From: systemsafety [mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of Peter Bernard Ladkin
Sent: 26 June 2017 10:25
To: systemsafety at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Subject: [SystemSafety] Fire tests on Panelling

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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