Big blaze in barking

[teuchter]

Glad everyone was safe. We'll have to see how it happened, but I've been expecting more incidents because I suspect the practical and immediate lessons from Grenfell (there are also political and long term lessons) should have been something like:

a) The building control system in this country has broken down from a mixture of privatisation and loosening of regulations
b) Cost-cutting culture in construction is so intense that it defies all logic or morals, and a good building control system is desperately needed

I find the idea of a years-long enquiry before anything is done about this intensely frustrating, even rage-inducing. I suspect a huge number of new blocks in the UK need to be reinspected, not just the ones with ACM cladding.

I agree that a years-long enquiry before fixing building regs is frustrating.

We don't yet know the full story here though.

As far as I can see they are private balconies, not access balconies. In other words they don't form part of an escape route.

It's not really possible to make any building 100% fire proof. You have to mitigate the risk and distinguish between risks that involve compromising people's ability to escape, and those which are to with protecting the property itself. There are good reasons to use timber as a building material, so I hope this doesn't lead to a thoughtless reaction that all exposed timber must be done away with.

Also - is it reasonable to expect that we design buildings that can cope with people lighting barbecues on enclosed baclonies (if that's what happened) or is it reasonable to expect people not to be entirely stupid - or the building managers to be very clear to residents about what's unsafe? The stuff that gets stored on balconies is probably as much a fire risk as timber cladding. The only way to remove that risk via building regulations would be to ban balconies in general.

 

[Ranbay]

Anyone else open this thinking it was about the Tory Race for PM?

 

[teuchter]

By the way, it's not actually true that no amendments have been made to the Building Regulations since Grenfell. There have been several amendments, published here

Fire safety: Approved Document B

The amendments, though, which include what's allowed as external cladding materials, and which I think would rule out any kind of timber at present, only apply to buildings over 18m. The 18m limit is to do with the reach of fire-fighting equipment. It looks like this building may be less than 18m. Looks like a maximum of 5 storeys high?

 

[mauvais]

We had a fire like this in Manchester a while back. I stood in the street watching it. I believe it started inside an apartment and spread outside to wooden balconies, then up.

Pan of food left cooking unattended might have caused blaze at Northern Quarter apartment block

The external fire was pretty severe and looked terrible, although not as much as this Barking one, but the actual compartmentalisation of the building did its job and only a couple of apartments were severely damaged.

 

[teuchter]

We had a fire like this in Manchester a while back. I stood in the street watching it. I believe it started inside an apartment and spread outside to wooden balconies, then up.

Pan of food left cooking unattended might have caused blaze at Northern Quarter apartment block

The external fire was pretty severe and looked terrible, although not as much as this Barking one, but the actual compartmentalisation of the building did its job and only a couple of apartments were severely damaged.

It looks like the timber floor structure to the balcony caught fire - whereas the timber cladding on the wall appears to have done what it's supposed to when treated with retardent - charred but not completely burnt.

 

[Brainaddict]

Also - is it reasonable to expect that we design buildings that can cope with people lighting barbecues on enclosed baclonies (if that's what happened) or is it reasonable to expect people not to be entirely stupid - or the building managers to be very clear to residents about what's unsafe? The stuff that gets stored on balconies is probably as much a fire risk as timber cladding. The only way to remove that risk via building regulations would be to ban balconies in general.

I think it's reasonable to expect that the structure of the building not spread fire between flats, no? Seems odd to me that this is relaxed for lower buildings. It seems like a generally bad thing to happen, even if the fire brigade ladders are long enough to reach.

I know they've tweaked the building regs but the system itself seems pretty screwed. Cladding problems are a symptom of a bigger system breakdown I think, so tweaking the cladding regs isn't the answer.

 

[andysays]

I agree that a years-long enquiry before fixing building regs is frustrating.

We don't yet know the full story here though.

As far as I can see they are private balconies, not access balconies. In other words they don't form part of an escape route.

It's not really possible to make any building 100% fire proof. You have to mitigate the risk and distinguish between risks that involve compromising people's ability to escape, and those which are to with protecting the property itself. There are good reasons to use timber as a building material, so I hope this doesn't lead to a thoughtless reaction that all exposed timber must be done away with.

Also - is it reasonable to expect that we design buildings that can cope with people lighting barbecues on enclosed baclonies (if that's what happened) or is it reasonable to expect people not to be entirely stupid - or the building managers to be very clear to residents about what's unsafe? The stuff that gets stored on balconies is probably as much a fire risk as timber cladding. The only way to remove that risk via building regulations would be to ban balconies in general.

Again, rather than this tendency to immediately point the finger of blame at residents, it might be 'reasonable' to ensure that people living in flats have enough space not to need to store stuff on balconies and access to somewhere other than a balcony where they can have a barbeque safely and comfortably.

 

[StoneRoad]

The number of people who use "disposable" BBQs on wooden surfaces is quite staggering; whether you are talking about a veranda / balcony on a log cabin in a holiday resort, or basic park tables and benches. Even grass will be scorched when one of the ally foil type is put on the ground.

They seem to have forgotten that metal conducts heat ...

 

[GarveyLives]

"From the Guardian....Peter Mason, chair of the Barking Reach residents’ association, told the Guardian that in early May he contacted the builder Bellway Homes to ask for the fire risk to be investigated after BBC Watchdog broadcast claims of fire safety problems at two other developments by the same builder.

In an email seen by the Guardian from the firm’s fire safety helpline last month, Bellway told him not to worry. In a section headed Your Home it said the construction method used on the development in Scotland examined by Watchdog was different and so the Barking homes were not affected in the same way.

It concluded: “We understand that these news articles are highly alarming for all residents of new homes and I hope that the above statement has allayed any fears you may have over the safety and construction of your Bellway home.”

Earlier this morning:

"Bellway has made no mention of the fire that engulfed the Barking Reach development in east London last weekend in its latest trading update to the market ..."

Bellway ignores Barking fire in latest trading update

(Source: Twitter)

"Customer satisfaction remains high and this has helped secure our position as a five-star home builder for another year ..."

 

[hash tag]

FWIW, I used to mange a 12, maybe 13 story tower block of sheltered housing a while back.
Benefits nights, cigarettes and gin, we had a serious fire there and a tenant sadly lost her life. The flat was destroyed. I remember seeing bed springs burnt and curled up in there;
I remember little all else. The fire was on the 6th floor (?). The only flat that was damaged was the flat where the fire was. There was a little smoke damage immediately outside
the flat but that was it. The fire and smoke was well contained and this was a tower block which must have been 30 years old at the time of the fire. it can be done; fires can be contained,
even in a property that age. Fire safety is nothing new. We really need to get our acts together in respect of modern property.

 

[teuchter]

I think it's reasonable to expect that the structure of the building not spread fire between flats, no? Seems odd to me that this is relaxed for lower buildings. It seems like a generally bad thing to happen, even if the fire brigade ladders are long enough to reach.

I know they've tweaked the building regs but the system itself seems pretty screwed. Cladding problems are a symptom of a bigger system breakdown I think, so tweaking the cladding regs isn't the answer.

I agree that something seems to have gone wrong here, if it spread quickly to the inside of several flats. The regs are stricter for tall buildings just because of the difficulty in firefighting, but even for smaller buildings the compartmentation should remain intact for a reasonable length of time (basically at least long enough for the fire brigade to get there and contain it).

We don't have enough info at the moment to know exactly what did go wrong though.

I also agree that tweaking cladding regs is not the full answer to systemic problems.

 

[teuchter]

Fire safety is nothing new. We really need to get our acts together in respect of modern property.

Fire safety, in general, is improving though.

I think it's also still true that the majority of domestic fires occur in single dwellings.

Of course if it turns out that this trend starts to reverse, and that this is to do with modern cladding systems, then the picture is different. But cladding systems have been around for several decades now.

 

[teuchter]

Again, rather than this tendency to immediately point the finger of blame at residents, it might be 'reasonable' to ensure that people living in flats have enough space not to need to store stuff on balconies and access to somewhere other than a balcony where they can have a barbeque safely and comfortably.

Some truth in that but actually I think that however much space there is in a flat without a garden, some people will tend to use the balcony as storage space.

Is it reasonable to assume that everyone has a right to barbecue in the immediate vicinity of their home? Nah, it's not necessarily practical in densely populated areas.

 

[Cid]

Some truth in that but actually I think that however much space there is in a flat without a garden, some people will tend to use the balcony as storage space.

Is it reasonable to assume that everyone has a right to barbecue in the immediate vicinity of their home? Nah, it's not necessarily practical in densely populated areas.

There’s also a large park/garden thing in that development about 20m away. And a public park basically next to the building.

 

[teuchter]

Here's a photo of one of the balconies. I've read elsewhere that the cladding is Thermowood.

 

[hash tag]

I live in quite a densely populated area and barbeques are banned in parks and on the commons.

Even if someone did manage to set fire to their balcony, which they shouldn't be able to do of course, it should not spread to other balconies. Surely, part of fire presentation is containment....contained to the room the fire started in, to the property it started in, to the floor it started on etc.

 

[Dogsauce]

Again, rather than this tendency to immediately point the finger of blame at residents, it might be 'reasonable' to ensure that people living in flats have enough space not to need to store stuff on balconies and access to somewhere other than a balcony where they can have a barbeque safely and comfortably.

Flats often don’t have space for prams and bikes (secure communal storage still gets robbed), things like that are commonly stuck out on balconies, together with wooden furniture, plastic plant pots, parasols etc. People have different storage needs and most flats are built on a one size fits all basis - for social housing in London there are minimum floor spaces for properties based on number of bedrooms and developers tend only to provide that. Private housing is actually worse as they don’t have these limits, usually smaller.

 

[teuchter]

I live in quite a densely populated area and barbeques are banned in parks and on the commons.

Even if someone did manage to set fire to their balcony, which they shouldn't be able to do of course, it should not spread to other balconies. Surely, part of fire presentation is containment....contained to the room the fire started in, to the property it started in, to the floor it started on etc.

You can't contain it within a room where the door is open*, and you can't stop it spreading from a balcony into a room if the door/window is open. You can't contain it within a balcony as a balcony by its nature is not enclosed. You can't reduce the risk of a fire starting on a balcony (or spreading to another balcony) to zero unless you have a certain way of ensuring nothing flammable is ever placed on either balcony, and the only way to do that would be to not have a balcony.

Of course, if the balcony is clad in flammable materials that's going to increase the risk. It seems like these balconies were clad in a material that shouldn't have caught fire. We don't at this point know why they did - was it because the wrong material had been used, or was the testing on that material insufficient, or was what was on the balconies relevant?

I can see a scenario where a fire starts on an upper balcony, and something on that balcony is very flammable and, for example, starts melting, which then spreads the fire further down. But that does seem a bit of an unlikely explanation here because of the area it spread across. So it seems likely there has been a failure of some of the materials used in the building.

*the regs used to require self-closers on internal doors, but in reality they would often be wedged open or the closers removed, so eventually it was realised that this measure didn't work in practice and it was taken out of the requirements. If I remember correctly it was partly replaced by an increased requirement for sprinkler systems in certain types of buildings.

 

[BryanLuc]

Glad everyone was safe. We'll have to see how it happened, but I've been expecting more incidents because I suspect the practical and immediate lessons from Grenfell (there are also political and long term lessons) should have been something like:

a) The building control system in this country has broken down from a mixture of privatisation and loosening of regulations
b) Cost-cutting culture in construction is so intense that it defies all logic or morals, and a good building control system is desperately needed

I find the idea of a years-long enquiry before anything is done about this intensely frustrating, even rage-inducing. I suspect a huge number of new blocks in the UK need to be reinspected, not just the ones with ACM cladding.

I find this very odd given the number of "jobsworths" who now work for LAs, and love to interfere in everybody's lives. We had a new bungalow built next door last year where the builder continually complained that he was held up all the time waiting for the building inspectors to approve seemingly every brick laid

 

[mx wcfc]

*the regs used to require self-closers on internal doors, but in reality they would often be wedged open or the closers removed, so eventually it was realised that this measure didn't work in practice and it was taken out of the requirements. If I remember correctly it was partly replaced by an increased requirement for sprinkler systems in certain types of buildings.

My mother moved into a new build 3 storey townhouse maybe 20 years ago. All the internal doors had self closers. She hated them and got me to remove them all. Once I had figured out how to do it, her neighbours did the same.

I confess I didn’t realise they were a fire safety thing.

Her current place is a flat in a 4 storey new build. No self closers on the doors. No sprinklers either.

 

[Cid]

You can't contain it within a room where the door is open*, and you can't stop it spreading from a balcony into a room if the door/window is open. You can't contain it within a balcony as a balcony by its nature is not enclosed. You can't reduce the risk of a fire starting on a balcony (or spreading to another balcony) to zero unless you have a certain way of ensuring nothing flammable is ever placed on either balcony, and the only way to do that would be to not have a balcony.

Of course, if the balcony is clad in flammable materials that's going to increase the risk. It seems like these balconies were clad in a material that shouldn't have caught fire. We don't at this point know why they did - was it because the wrong material had been used, or was the testing on that material insufficient, or was what was on the balconies relevant?

I can see a scenario where a fire starts on an upper balcony, and something on that balcony is very flammable and, for example, starts melting, which then spreads the fire further down. But that does seem a bit of an unlikely explanation here because of the area it spread across. So it seems likely there has been a failure of some of the materials used in the building.

*the regs used to require self-closers on internal doors, but in reality they would often be wedged open or the closers removed, so eventually it was realised that this measure didn't work in practice and it was taken out of the requirements. If I remember correctly it was partly replaced by an increased requirement for sprinkler systems in certain types of buildings.

It doesn’t have any fire resistance beyond normal wood (data sheet says class d). It’s just called thermowood because it’s treated at very high temperatures (200c). It might make it less risky than standard pine by removing resins, but other than that it seems mostly to be for dimensional stability, getting rid of bugs etc. It’s also a very quick turnaround, only 36 hours in the kiln. It is possible that something in that process makes it more flammable and hasn’t been picked up on... but doesn’t seem that likely.

Personally would err on the side of poor treatment, if I had to. But a lot we don’t know.

 

[Cid]

My mother moved into a new build 3 storey townhouse maybe 20 years ago. All the internal doors had self closers. She hated them and got me to remove them all. Once I had figured out how to do it, her neighbours did the same.

I confess I didn’t realise they were a fire safety thing.

Her current place is a flat in a 4 storey new build. No self closers on the doors. No sprinklers either.

Yeah, that’s not a good idea.

 

[hash tag]

Her current place is a flat in a 4 storey new build. No self closers on the doors. No sprinklers either.

I'm not sure of the legality of not having auto door closers, fire strips etc.
When we moved into our place, there were some auto closers missing. The previous owner didn't do the snagging properly before completing on it. There were also large holes behind cupboards where down pipes and stuff are. We have had those sealed not only because of fire risk, but smells, noise and vermin.

 

[teuchter]

It doesn’t have any fire resistance beyond normal wood (data sheet says class d). It’s just called thermowood because it’s treated at very high temperatures (200c). It might make it less risky than standard pine by removing resins, but other than that it seems mostly to be for dimensional stability, getting rid of bugs etc. It’s also a very quick turnaround, only 36 hours in the kiln. It is possible that something in that process makes it more flammable and hasn’t been picked up on... but doesn’t seem that likely.

Yes, you're quite right, I had misread something earlier. It's not intrinsically more fire resistant. So if it had any fire retardant properties they would have relied on treatments added after.

From some further reading it seems that balconies might not be captured by the regulations that cover cladding materials, and therefore it could be that they weren't treated at all (and didn't have to be, for building regs)

 

[Cid]

Yes, you're quite right, I had misread something earlier. It's not intrinsically more fire resistant. So if it had any fire retardant properties they would have relied on treatments added after.

From some further reading it seems that balconies might not be captured by the regulations that cover cladding materials, and therefore it could be that they weren't treated at all (and didn't have to be, for building regs)

Ah... if something like that was the case, then that thin ceiling lattice under the boards seems like a very bad idea.

 

[teuchter]

Ah... if something like that was the case, then that thin ceiling lattice under the boards seems like a very bad idea.

This has all prompted me to have a look through Approved Document B2 (which sets out building regs in relation to fire safety).

The fact is that it really doesn't say much about the combustibility of materials on the outsides of buildings under 18m. With certain exceptions (for example close to escape routes) there's not really much to stop you having combustible materials, whether or not balconies are involved.

Although the regs were already revised for buildings higher than 18m, there's an ongoing consultation to make significant changes to part B:

Technical review of Approved Document B of the building regulations: a call for evidence

Something I thought was interesting in there; a comment that modern insulation might make fire spread more quickly on the outside of buildings. I assume the thinking is, that with earlier, badly insulated buildings, heat from a fire on the outside of a building would be conducted away into the mass of its structure, but now, if you have insulation behind the burning materials, the heat is not going to dissipate at all and intensify the fire spread.

 

[Southlondon]

Yeah, that’s not a good idea.

Same as when people cover their smoke detectors so they can burn toast without setting the alarms off. I’ve been in plenty of homes with fire doors wedged open, smoke detectors covered up, and ashtrays balanced on the arm of the sofa ready to receive the last fag butt of the day before going to bed. Some people are arseholes

 

[Brainaddict]

I find this very odd given the number of "jobsworths" who now work for LAs, and love to interfere in everybody's lives. We had a new bungalow built next door last year where the builder continually complained that he was held up all the time waiting for the building inspectors to approve seemingly every brick laid

Nobody I know who has worked with builders would trust them to do everything right. Do you know how to check their work? Very few people do, and so we have independent 'jobsworths' whose job it is to make sure your new building doesn't fall down. How very dare they.

 

[hash tag]

I would guess fire retardant timber would be specified in a contract and other than going through all the receipts, I don't know if a planning officer could check this. Even then, the suppliers may have supplied on the cheap.
reiterating what Brainaddict has said, I remember faults coming to light months after handover and sometimes even a year later.
At one of my sheltered housing schemes, recently refurbished. I found auto closers missing and fire strips missing. There were no lightening conductors which really screwed the scheme up and a year or so later, we found out the drains and down pipes had been sabotaged by the builders. All this was despite a clerk of works overseeing the work and signing off handover from the contractors

 

[Poi E]

At one of my sheltered housing schemes, recently refurbished. I found auto closers missing and fire strips missing. There were no lightening conductors which really screwed the scheme up and a year or so later, we found out the drains and down pipes had been sabotaged by the builders. All this was despite a clerk of works overseeing the work and signing off handover from the contractors

Sounds like a relative's experience of South African township construction.