The horror of fires in high
rise buildings
There was a 1974 movie called, The
Towering Inferno. Later there was another such movie in 1991 titled, Fire: Trapped on the 37th floor. Needless to say, they were very
scary movies.
During
the late evening of May 4, 1988, and the early morning of May 5, 1988, members
of the Los Angeles City Fire Department successfully battled what has proven to
be the worst, most devastating high-rise fire in the history of Los
Angeles. Extinguishing this blaze at the 62-story First Interstate Bank
Building, at 707 West Wilshire Boulevard, required the combined efforts of 64
fire companies, 10 City rescue ambulances, 17 private ambulances, 4
helicopters, 53 Command Officers and support personnel, a complement of 383
Firefighters and Paramedics. One civilian life was lost and only
four floors were gutted.
On February 23rd,
1991 around 8:30 p.m. a fire broke out in a high rise office building when
oil-soaked rags left by a contractor on the vacant 22nd floor caught
fire. Throughout the night, thick smoke could be seen for miles around as
firefighters battled the office building throughout the night.
Later, a report reported that there were water supply issues,
heavy smoke and other factors hampering the firefighting efforts. It wasn’t
until 3 p.m. on February 24th that the fire was finally brought
under control. The fire gutted eight stories of the building; and caused $100
million in direct property loss and three firefighters died fighting the fire
according to the Fire Administration
report. As the Meridian building sat
boarded up and vacant for years, battles raged over what to do with the
destroyed building as litigation resulted in an estimated $4 billion in civil
damage claims. Later, the building was
torn down.
In 2013, there was a fire in a high rise apartment building in France. The flames moved quickly upwards on the outside of one side of the
building. The exterior of the building was clad in Polystyrene which is a foam that
is typically used for insulating a structure like the recent Grenfell Towers
apartment building that caught fire. That kind of insulation can be highly
inflammable.
In January 19th 2017, in Tehran, Iran, a high-rise building engulfed by a fire collapsed killing at
least 30 firefighters and injuring some 75 people. Police tried to keep out
shopkeepers and others wanting to rush back in to collect their valuables. They
had slipped through the police lines and gone back into the building. A side of
the building came down first, tumbling perilously close to a firefighter
perched on a ladder and spraying water on the blaze. Soon after, the rest of
the building came down. Those who ran into the building managed to escape but
some were injured while inside the building.
Fighting fires in buildings is very dangerous. Ask any firefighter who
climbed the stairs in the 7/11 fire in New York. The two buildings collapsed
while some of the firefighters were still in the building.
In the smoky caldron of a high-rise fire,
it is the firefighter’s worst nightmare when a door is left ajar, a window that
suddenly breaks under intense heat and a blast of wind fuels the flames. At its
worst, the outcome is catastrophic. Known to firefighters as a blowtorch
effect, the instant combination of fire and wind can blast fireballs across
rooms and down corridors without warning and within seconds, temperatures
render hoses and protective clothing of little use.
In New York City, at least 11 people,
including four firefighters, have died as a direct result of those kinds of
fires since 1980, and dozens of others have been badly burned. For
firefighters, it is like walking into the barrel of a loaded shotgun that is
about to be fired.
Back in January 1952, when I was a young
teenage recruit at a navy boot camp in Nova Scotia, one of the many buildings
in the base caught fire. Our division was called out in the middle of the
winter night to fight the fire. I was given a hose to spray water at the flames
coming out of one of the windows. The hose had better control of me than I had
of the hose since I was a small teenage runt then. Worse yet, the wind was
blowing the thick choking smoke in my face. Then I heard a voice that was so welcoming
to my ears. “Shut off your hoses, boys. We can’t save the damn building.”
I am afraid of raging
fires like most if not all people are. However, we trainees had to be taught
how to get close to fires and put them out. A barrel of oil was set on fire and
we each had to use our hoses to keep the fire from reaching us. It is accomplished
when you turn the nozzle to the spray mode.
“Get closer, Batchelor!”
exclaimed the instructor. I moved an inch closer. As I said earlier, I am
afraid of raging fires. I definitely
would not want to be a fire fighter. The proof of that was obvious when in
1959, I was given the opportunity by a captain in the Fire Department in
Toronto who was a friend of mine to become a firefighter. My reply to him? “No thanks, definitely no
thanks and absolutely no thanks.” If I was fighting a raging fire and my captain
told me to move closer—moving only an inch would get me nothing more but a well-deserved
boot in my ass.
And now I will tell you
about the worst high rise fire in history. It was the raging fire in the Grenfell
Towers high rise apartment building that took place on June 14th
2017 in the district of North
Kensington in London, UK.
Grenfell Tower had been undergoing a major refurbishment. The tower block is managed by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation on behalf of the Council and contains 120 homes. The apartment tower which has 127 flats, with 227 bedrooms, at the time of the fire had been built 42 years earlier. The large scale works included the installation of insulated exterior cladding, new double glazed windows and a new communal heating system. A new communal entrance has been created and there were new facilities for returning tenants. Grenfell also had a Nursery and a Dale Youth Amateur Boxing Club.
Most
building fires are caused by outright stupidity and in this particular fire, it
wasn’t just one act of stupidity; it was many acts of stupidity brought about
by a large number of stupid fools. No doubt, some will face manslaughter
charges and most of them will face civil trials that will render the surviving
persons millions of dollars in restitution.
Firefighters battled the
massive fire and evacuated as many residents they could find from the burning
27-floor high-rise. The fire fighters fight was a losing battle. It was as
hopeless as trying to put out a gasoline fire with a small squirt gun.
London's Metropolitan Police
said a number of people were being treated for a range of injuries. Alas, they
couldn’t save 79 of the residents. There may even be more victims lost in the
fire because some are reported missing. If they were burned into ashes, it
would be impossible to actually determine who they were since the ashes would
be scattered around the rooms, hallways and stairs they were in.
Flames consumed the Grenfell Tower so quickly that arriving
firefighters wondered if they could even get inside the building. People
trapped on the higher floors screamed for their lives through broken windows
but it was to no avail. They were trapped as the fire was by then burning
throughout the entire building. Flames and smoke were still shooting from windows all the
way up one side of the Grenfell Tower more than three hours after the blaze
started.
The fire started in an
apartment on the fourth floor. It was a faulty fridge that had burst into
flames. Police
later announced on the 23rd of June
that the initial cause of the fire was a faulty model FF175BP fridge-freezer produced under the Hotpoint
brand for Whirlpool. Owners of the types FF175BP
and FF175BG freezers were urged to register their appliance with the
manufacturer to receive any updates. Sixty-four thousand of these models were
made between March 2006 and July 2009, after which the model was then discontinued.
It is unknown how many are still in use. The manufacturer of the fridge was aware of the possibilities that
those particular fridges were prone to catching fire and yet they didn’t recall
the fridges. That was blunder # one.
The tenant in the apartment
ran down the hallway warning people to get out of the building as the fire in
his apartment was uncontrollable.
The London police blamed flammable materials used in the
facade for the spread of the blaze. The material used in the facade is referred
to as cladding. The speed at which the fire spread is believed to have been
increased by the building's exterior cladding. Using flammable facades is
another blunder.
The newly
renovated facade of the tower was built as
follows; exterior cladding
comprised of aluminium sandwich plates (3 mm each) with polyethylene core,
a standard ventilation gap (50 mm) between the cladding and the insulation
behind it that is insulation made of polyisocyanurate
foam plates (150 mm) mounted on the existing façade.
The type of cladding believed to
have been used on Grenfell Towers was a polyethylene filler that is not
compliant with building regulations for taller buildings in the U.K. The
cladding is like a sandwich, with most types containing a thin aluminum
skin on the outside and a core with a polymer plastic foam-like
material that acts as insulation that blocks wind and wards
off moisture. It must also withstand fire from both the outside and
within. The cladding in the Grenfell Towers did not withstand the fire. In
fact, it fed the fire. In the case of the Grenfell Tower fire, other
factors also may have fuelled the inferno, including the space between the
cladding and the building structure, which some suggest led to a so-called
chimney effect.
One of the ways
to stop the chimney effect is to ensure that the insulation in that space
can't burn by using stone wool insulation instead. Further, the cavities could
be broken up at every floor with something that inhibits fire, like a
piece of sheet metal. That apparently was missing in this
building. That was the third blunder.
A 2011 study of fire toxicity of
insulating materials at the University of Central Lancashire's Centre for Fire and Hazard Science studied polyiscyanurate (PIR)
and other commonly used materials under realistic and wide-ranging conditions
that were representative of a wider range of fire hazards. The report
stated that most fire deaths resulted
from toxic product inhalation. The study evaluated the degree to which toxic
products were released, looking at toxicity, time-release profiles, and
lethality of doses released, in a range of flaming, non-flaming, and poorly
ventilated fires, and concluded that PIR generally released a considerably
higher level of toxic products than the other insulating materials studied. This
can explain why many of the tenants in the Grenfell Tower couldn’t escape. Arnold
Tarling, associate director of Hindwoods Chartered Surveyors,
said he's warned about the risks of not using fire- resistant
cladding. No one paid attention to his warnings. That was the fourth blunder.
The absence of a sprinkler system
or fire alarms were also issues in the Grenfell Towers, which no doubt
played a large role in mitigating
the effects of fire deaths regardless of whether cladding was involved.
Further, there wasn’t a single indoor fire escape in the building. The stairs in the centre of the building were
completely gutted by the fire since they weren’t fireproofed. Those were the
fifth, sixth and seventh blunders.
The tenant complained to the Kensington and
Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation
about the Tower not having the fires alarm or a sprinkling system in their
apartments. Their complaints went unheeded. The
building wasn't safe. It's not about looking good from the outside; it's
about being safe on the inside.
That particular London fire also
raised concerns about the refurbishment of old buildings in general, and how
much that contributed to the scale of the blaze at the Grenfell Towers.
It's certainly plausible there are
unscrupulous owners, contractors and professional designers in the UK who were
and still are ignoring safety codes. If any of them were complicit in any
manner with respect to Grenfell Towers, they should be charged with
manslaughter and if convicted, sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.
A small baby was dropped from either the ninth or tenth floor
to the people below whom with outstretched hands, caught the baby. The parents
died in the fire. A six-year-old boy was dropped from the sixth floor and he
also survived. I don’t know what happened to his parents. Seventy-nine tenants died in the fire and
many were injured.
The eighth blunder was that the tenants in the upper floors
were told to remain in their apartments. They did and they also died in their
apartments. If they took the stairs that were in the middle of the building,
they may have survived. The same thing
occurred in the twin towers in the 9/11 disaster. The people in the lower
floors were told to remain in their offices. They did and when the two
buildings collapsed, those who were told to remain in their offices and remained
in their offices—were crushed to death.
How easy it is for fools to give stupid advice to others when
the fools are not personally in danger.
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