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Grenfell Tower.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60816108

The beginning.......

"The first 999 call came from Behailu Kebede at 00:54 BST, who lived in Flat 16. His smoke alarm woke him up and he saw what was in all probability an electrical fire at the back of his fridge freezer. He called for help, alerted neighbours and waited for the London Fire Brigade to arrive.

Sir Martin Moore-Bick's report found Mr Kebede blameless. He turned off his electricity and closed the flat door to keep others safe."

Z.

  • It seems to me that the manufacturer of the fridge-freezer is the most culpable party.   A properly designed an manufactured  one should not catch fire

  • However in a block with hundreds of rooms, crossing fingers and hoping there will never be a fire in any of the kitchens is a poor approach to safety. Far better to design to limit  the damage, so just the one flat burns out.

    Actually modern fridge gasses, being no longer the ozone damaging fluro-carbons that do not decompose, are now things like cyclo-pentane, which is much easier to dispose of by oxidation (= burning ! ).
    This is a similarly deliberate calculation that the very rare extra incidence of  fire at ground level is a small price to pay set against a certain  damage to large populations by rising levels  of mutagenic UV radiation  reaching the ground due to reduced density of high altitude ozone.
    For the same reason paint and hair spray propellants have been slightly more flammable since the early 1980s.

    Mike

  • Unfortunately Grenfell has been back in the news yesterday for the wrong reasons.

    news.sky.com/.../grenfell-tower-inquiry-government-has-failed-to-complete-a-single-recommendation-sadiq-khan-says-12571898

  • That's just what my link said above.

    Grenfell tragedy: Government is failing to act on inquiry report, says London mayor

    The London Fire Brigade has done so though. Good for it.

    Link..........www.thesun.co.uk/.../

    Z.

  • That's just what my link said above.

    Are you suggesting I don’t read all the way through your posts?

  • Did you read the BBC link right at the top of this thread?

    Z.

  • However in a block with hundreds of rooms, crossing fingers and hoping there will never be a fire in any of the kitchens is a poor approach to safety.

    Indeed. Just from an engineering persective it's pretty impossible make any one thing 100% perfect under all possible conditions - even 99% is still pretty difficult and expensive. The old "defence in depth" approach (which goes back to medieval castles at least) is a far more practical way of achieving the same (or better) results - you have several layers of defence - each of which may have its weaknesses (let's say for the sake of example that each layer is just 80% effective). Since all layers have to fail for a catastrophy to occur, the chances of overall failure are rapidly reduced by simply adding more layers - 1 layer 80% effective (20% change of failure) - 2 layers 20%*20%=4% chance of failure so 96%  effective, 3 layers 20%*20%*20%=0.8% chance of failure so 99.2% effective and so on. In the Grenfell situation the first layer would be for the applicance not to overheat/catch fire in the first place, the 2nd layer was likely an attempt to contain the overheating within the appliance's casing, the 3rd to confine the fire to the room, the 4th to limit it to the flat, then the next to the floor, and so on. So for things to go horribly wrong multiple layers must have failed (or been by-passed) and so just picking one layer to blame for everything might not be entirely fair.

       - Andy.

  • Picking one layer to blame for everything might not be entirely fair.

    No.  Blaming the freezer manufacturer for everything would be far from fair.

    But, equally, entirely absolving them from blame - as the report appears to do - is not fair