Ch4 Dispatches Grenfell

[scotta]

I haven’t watched the documentary but did the fire service somehow actively prevent residents from exiting? I live in a high rise apartment, it also has stickers everywhere saying to stay put if there’s a fire. A few years ago the restaurant on the ground floor caught fire and I just picked up a dog under each arm and exited via the staircase along with most other residents. Fuck staying put if you have a way out.

It was 1am. Presumably most were in bed.

[Orange Cola]

There are ways to reflect and learn from these things and prevent them from happening again in the future, that in itself is something we should be proud of doing.

[Nefarious]

Pretty horrific really, and I think on balance that it's fair to apportion some of the blame to the senior controllers who wanted to stick to the 'process' whilst ignoring the fact that the process didn't really apply based on what they could see with their own eyes.

Didn't see the programme, but just to chuck in my twopenneth of first hand experience:

Back when I lived on an estate in London, I witnessed a second floor fire in a high rise block. It was one of the 60's blocks with the "stay put" protocol. From the outside, the fire looked absolutely terrifying - blasting out of the affected flat's window like a blowtorch. Massive flames were reaching up 3-4 stories above the fire, and I'm not talking about the occasional lick of yellow, I mean proper intense furnace-style roasting.
The idea that people were potentially still in those flats, and deliberately so, was, to my untrained eye, scarcely believable.
But it was right. The aftermath was a proper mess, but even though the whole outside of the building was scorched and blackened, the windows had held and the fire isolation strategy had worked. There was no actual fire anywhere other than the flat that had burned. (Nobody was hurt, BTW)

The point is - what you or I consider raging, out of control, and evidence of immanent failure is just what these really intense fires look like. Sure, a trained senior controller there on the ground should know the difference, but it's not as cut and dry as the people saying "it was obviously out of control from minute one" are saying.

[Simon]

Fair comment.

[NotoriousREV]

Imagine bringing knowledge and experience to an internet discussion.

[dinny_g]

Don’t ever let it happen again!

Seriously though, valid point...