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Are our Tower Blocks safe?

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Does anyone else think this article is somewhat misleading and not very good ?

It discusses two sheffield buildings

 

1 The arts tower

It suggests this is at risk yet I do not believe this has been cladded ? Its just glass and steel.

 

2. A student housing block..

Looking at the picture it is mainly brick.

 

 

The rest of the article says nothing that has not been on news sites and just uses headline grabbing words like "ticking time bombs" and "incompetent councils" whilst not substantiating its claims.

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Does anyone else think this article is somewhat misleading and not very good ?

It discusses two sheffield buildings

 

1 The arts tower

It suggests this is at risk yet I do not believe this has been cladded ? Its just glass and steel.

 

2. A student housing block..

Looking at the picture it is mainly brick.

 

 

The rest of the article says nothing that has not been on news sites and just uses headline grabbing words like "ticking time bombs" and "incompetent councils" whilst not substantiating its claims.

:hihi:

Don't take everything at face value!

 

It's just a badly written article quickly cobbled together to promote a marketing website! :roll:

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I would be interested to see the Councils records for checking high rise blocks every day. The only thing that I can find on the Interweb is a pdf file from Sheffield Council saying checks are done every 6 weeks

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It is easy for the Council or any other property owner to say that the materials used in their​ properties met all the relevant standards. I think it is unlikely that any don't. Cladding will meet necessary fire standards etc.

 

Although a public enquiry will get the answers, this will not be for several years. I hope that the people assessing other buildings now will look beyond the basic "it meets current regulations" and try and consider what may have happened here, ie is the cladding just fire retardant but can still burn if the circumstances are right, or is it fully inert. Also, is there a path for fire to spread, and the availability of a chimney effect to draw the fire.

 

It's easy to say that a building was constructed to the correct codes. Some councils have already said this. But it is just a platitude. If it wasn't constructed correctly, it should never have been signed off. Nobody is ever going to say that their buildings are believed to be unsafe.

 

Something went wrong here, and we don't, for certain, know what and why. Anyone with the knee jerk reaction of "our building used approved materials, so no need to worry" is being complacent.

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Builders and architects, project managers etc are very much inclined to cover their own asses(ts).

Your right they're very unlikely to disclose any known safety risks, they may simply put the manufacturers safety data sheets or product info in a folder pass it on to the owner and consider it done and adequate.

A good example of this is with asbestos, getting anybody who's involved and responsible for designing or building something to state unequivocally that there's no asbestos is nigh on impossible. Even in a modern building we had built 'to the best of our knowledge' is the most definite answer we could extract regarding the lack of asbestos in it. Which is as good as saying 'maybe, er we don't know'.

 

I'm not sure on this, but anybody in a public building, high rise, school etc should be able to get access to the latest fire risk assessment, which will detail any shortcomings by the assessor and will have time scales to remedy any shortcomings and should have reasons included for not doing suggested works.

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I wonder about the boom in external insulation for houses. Is this safe? Could this be a fire risk? Since expanded polystyrene melts and gives off toxic fumes, should we be alarmed by this trend?

 

I'm not sure about the toxic fumes part, but if you have a bean bag at home, take out a hand full of the contents and set fire to it. No flame it just extinguishs itself into dust - doesn't melt.

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News right now. Three other blocks have combustible cladding. 600 blocks have similar cladding to Grenfell Tower.

 

Councils have been told to send samples of any cladding for testing. Odd, considering a council spokeswoman said Sheffield Tower blocks were safe LAST WEEK. How did she know? On what evidence did she base her assurance? Or was she just spouting rubbish to deflect any concerns from residents??

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News right now. Three other blocks have combustible cladding. 600 blocks have similar cladding to Grenfell Tower.

 

Councils have been told to send samples of any cladding for testing. Odd, considering a council spokeswoman said Sheffield Tower blocks were safe LAST WEEK. How did she know? On what evidence did she base her assurance? Or was she just spouting rubbish to deflect any concerns from residents??

 

I would expect that the default position is "we specify that all work must meet all fire and building regulations, so we are able to say that our buildings are safe".

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Most likely the building regulations need updating to not allow the use of inflammable cladding.

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we don't have for the last 5 months any emergency lighting in the tenants hall owned by the council on gresley road lowedges,and all we get is we are trying to sort it,so what chance do the tower blocks have.

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Most likely the building regulations need updating to not allow the use of inflammable cladding.

 

It looks like it. I must admit that until this event I'd not given any thought to the subject, and just assumed that we would have good standards in place. Until I retired, I was involved in Engineering/Construction (but not Civil Engineering/Architecture), and was always used to safety standards improving year on year, or at least every few years, and certainly not going backwards. As problems arise or are identified, or dangers are no longer regarded as acceptable, solutions are put in place. In this case, it's looking like we actually added a cladding without realising that it could compromise the fire rating of the building as a whole and were then slow to react when this problem was identified.

 

Where I worked, pretty much any change we made to an existing design included a series of risk assessments and safety reviews. Some of these sometimes seemed like going through the motions, as an arse covering excercise, ticking boxes. But they weren't. They were hard work if done properly, and were undertaken to ensure, as best we could, that what we were building was safe, both to construct and to use. There were no end of "what if" scenarios considered.

 

I wonder what level of assessment was made when deciding to clad these buildings, and whether the risk of compromising the fire protection integrity of each flat was ever considered. No doubt this will come out in the enquiry. I bet there are a few designers checking back through their design records to see if they are squeaky clean.

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Ive not heard anyone mention private flats, do these already have sprinkler system fitted..

 

eg park hill/urban or what ever its called ..........anyone know

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