[SystemSafety] Grenfell Inquiry - Fire Expert's Report

Peter Bernard Ladkin ladkin at causalis.com
Mon Jun 4 14:27:24 CEST 2018


Barbara Lane has given evidence to the Grenfell Tower inquiry. Dr. Lane is FREng, Chartered Fire
Engineer, and Leader of Fire Safety Engineering at Arup.

Looking at the engineering, there is a list of stuff that should have worked but didn't. There is
also one feature which apparently wasn't tested or assessed in any reasonable way to determine if it
met regulations, namely the cladding. The Guardian reports:

[begin quote]

Lane was damning about the cladding, which she said was “non-compliant with the functional
requirement of the building regulations”.

She said: “I have found no evidence yet that any member of the design team or the construction
ascertained the fire performance of the rainscreen cladding system materials, nor understood how the
assembly performed in fire. I have found no evidence that building control were either informed or
understood how the assembly would perform in a fire. Further, I have found no evidence that the
[tenant management organisation] risk assessment recorded the fire performance of the rainscreen
cladding system, nor have I found evidence that the LFB [London Fire Brigade] risk assessment
recorded the fire performance of the rainscreen cladding.”

[End quote]

The article is at
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jun/04/expert-lists-litany-of-serious-safety-breaches-at-grenfell-tower

One can see an argument here for increased emphasis on regular proof tests (lifts and water supply).
You can't exactly proof-test an installed fire-door, but these are static. Surely inspection should
suffice? But the idea that the performance in fire of the cladding was unknown to anyone involved in
design, construction or assessment is surely a gap in regulation.

This week's proceedings are not yet on the Inquiry WWW site.

It set me thinking about engineering safety regimes again. This seems banal, but here goes.
Commercial aviation is goal-driven (14 CFR is absolute), but allows risk in the acceptable means of
compliance, and much of that is paper failure-assessment, risk-calculation driven. This entails that
paper must exist, containing some numbers (whether believable numbers or not). IEC 61508 is not
absolute, takes the risk as fundamental, and uses discretised risk calculations to drive conformance
paperwork. It seems a mixture of prescription (the myriad requirements for documentation on this and
that) and goal-driven (but the goals are low-level detailed). The building regulations are absolute
as concerns fire performance, thus goal-driven, but there is obviously a disconnect to assessment if
it is possible to use certain fabrication materials which inherit a fire-performance requirement
without actually having any document which shows that that performance has been assessed as
satisfactory.

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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