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29 Sep, 4 tweets, 1 min read
New: Residents at a 22-storey tower block owned by Clarion in east London were told today they need to move out due to safety concerns

insidehousing.co.uk/news/residents…
This one, by the way, is not about the 2000s/10s industry and government balls up of cladding, it's the 1960s/70s industry/gov balls up of large panel system construction. And not dealing with that despite knowing about it for 50 years (plus)
But a very tough day for an east London community who now face upheaval, home loss and uncertainty about whether they can stay in their community. The one consistent thing with badly built buildings: people suffer.
They have questions for Clarion about how long issues have been known and whether they could or should have been found sooner. Block recently fitted with (pretty expensive) sprinklers and alarms so clearly Clarion wasn't expecting this.

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Peter Apps Profile picture
8 Sep
Update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

Any fire risk assessor who does not make the increased risk to disabled high rise residents clear is not making a "suitable and sufficient" assessment, says expert
A large part of this morning spent on the issue of evacuation plans - and what should have been done for residents who were unable to use the stairs to evacuate
As we now know, at Grenfell no specific provisions were made for many disabled people in the tower, and reliance was placed on 'stay put' (something that was and remains true of many other tower blocks)
Read 19 tweets
Peter Apps Profile picture
3 Sep
I think a question left hanging a few times on Newsnight last night was: Is the current building safety remediation effort an overreaction?

Here's a thread trying to answer it. In a nutshell - it's more a case of trying to solve the wrong problem in the wrong way (1/?)
You have to go back to the beginning a bit to explain how we ended up here. Grenfell was clad in an extremely combustible material called 'ACM'. For the first 18 months or so after the fire, that's all the government was focused on remediating.
But then in autumn 2018, things started to change. Civil servants were sent some testing showing a popular non-ACM system failing pretty badly. There was mounting concern about other materials which were also very flammable.
Read 15 tweets
Peter Apps Profile picture
2 Sep
This is a very strong offering from Newsnight which - following several reports over the last few months - has dedicated its entire show to the building safety crisis and has nailed the key points. No government representative willing to argue its case on air.
Will this finally be the moment this national scandal becomes a national leading story in the way it should be? Maybe. But there have been several times over the last four years when I thought that was about to happen and it hasn't yet.
I think the thing is though this story just won't ever go away. However exhausted the campaigners get (and many of them are - it has been a hell of a slog to this point), people have no real choice but to keep fighting.
Read 5 tweets
Peter Apps Profile picture
6 Jul
The Building Safety Bill was never intended to solve the problem of fixing existing building safety issues. Unsurprisingly, it provides no real answers.

The big question is why - four years on - has the government not looked for a proper legislative solution to this crisis?
To those who are newer to the story, the BSB implements Dame Judith Hackitt's review of construction practices. This is all about building new buildings and maintaining them - not getting cladding, timber balconies and dodgy fire breaks off existing towers.
Instead, this bill ultimately retains the status quo for remediation. Requiring building owners to explore other options is a gesture. For most people, extending the right to sue is as well (sue who? for what?)
Read 14 tweets
Peter Apps Profile picture
24 Jun
Update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

KCTMO chief executive questioned over alleged 'concealment and half truth' and 'attempt to blame the fire service' in response to Grenfell residents raising concerns about fire safety in 2010
So this morning, Robert Black - the former chief executive of KCTMO - continued giving evidence to the inquiry about fire safety issues in the build up to the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017
A particularly interesting run of questions covered a fire in the tower in April 2010, when some recycling bags piled up in a communal area were set alight. As we know from previous witnesses - this exposed a serious fault with the tower's smoke extraction system...
Read 22 tweets
Peter Apps Profile picture
1 Jun
Update from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry:

Fire risk assessor reassured TMO that Grenfell cladding "complied with the building regulations" less than two months before the fire
Carl Stokes, who did risk assessments for Grenfell Tower and other buildings in Kensington from 2010 to 2017, was asked to comment on a letter sent by the London Fire Brigade in April 2017 following concerns about a fire in Shepherd's Bush
That fire spread up the building via spandrel panels made of timber of polystyrene and prompted the LFB to "strongly urge" considering the issue of external fire spread in future risk assessments. The email went to RBKC, who forwarded it to the TMO, who forward it to Stokes.
Read 8 tweets

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