[SystemSafety] Grenfell Inquiry - Fire Expert's Report

[Peter Bishop]

While the use of inflammable cladding was obviously disastrous, there
was a design failure that seems to have got less attention.

<quote>

There was “a culture of non-compliance” at the tower which contained
more combustible material than previously thought, fire safety experts
revealed. This included flammable parts to the window frames that spread
the fire to the external cladding within 15 minutes of the first 999
call, at just before 12.54am from a householder whose fridge freezer
appeared to be alight.

<end quote>

The new design moved the window to be flush with the cladding, and the
surround between aperture in the real wall and the aperture in the
cladding was not fire proof.

If the window had been kept in its original position, the fire would not
have got into the cladding, and back through the windows above, filling
the whole building with toxic smoke.

Peter Bishop

On 04/06/2018 13:27, Peter Bernard Ladkin wrote:
> 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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-- 

Peter Bishop
Chief Scientist
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