What’s the difference between an accident and an outrage? The fire at Grenfell Towers, London, that killed at least 80 people—a definitive total won’t be known for months according to the authorities—resulted from a series of decisions made by those in charge of construction. Almost certainly, had they made different choices, most if not all of the deaths could have been avoided. Furthermore, common sense regulations should have taken those choices out of their hands, and only safe, fire-resistant materials should have been authorized. There is plenty of blame to go around, but the underlying problem was an ideological hostility to regulation.
The story behind the fire is a long and complicated one. This New York Times article is a good starting point. For even more details you can go to Wikipedia. But the guts of it is this: One tenant owned a crappy fridge: a Hotpoint model FF175BP that was long known to be problematic and which the manufacturer discontinued in 2009. The fridge’s back was plastic, not metal. The London Fire Brigade has been lobbying for years on this matter to no avail, and is so strongly opposed to these plastic-backed refrigerators that they have put up videos on their website of fridges engulfed in flames.
The faulty fridge is bad enough, but the bigger problem involves the paneling or cladding, an outside layer of materials placed on the building’s facade during a reconstruction done over the last few years. The cladding chosen here included some combustible material. How much would it have cost to use cladding that wasn’t combustible? £5,000. In U.S. dollars, that’s about $6,500. And that’s for the whole building, which you can see from the photo above is not a small one.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2tBNbSY
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