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From ABC News:
The list of high-rise apartment towers in Britain that have failed fire safety tests grew to 60, officials said Sunday, revealing the mounting challenge the government faces in the aftermath of London's Grenfell Tower fire tragedy.
All of the buildings for which external cladding samples were so far submitted failed combustibility tests, Communities Secretary Sajid Javid said. As of late Sunday, that includes 60 towers from 25 different areas of the country — double the figure given a day earlier.
More from the BBC:
The Local Government Association said some councils have introduced 24-hour warden patrols to mitigate the risk before cladding is removed.
It said in a statement: "Where cladding fails the test, this will not necessarily mean moving residents from tower blocks.
"In Camden, the decision to evacuate was based on fire inspectors' concerns about a combination of other fire hazards together with the cladding."
So it looks like, far from an isolated thing, basically everyone had the bright idea to do this.
(Score: 5, Informative) by tonyPick on Monday June 26 2017, @09:06AM (8 children)
Getting fired in the name of cutting spending for quite a few years now, apparently:
From 2015: https://www.fbu.org.uk/policy/2015/future-fire-and-rescue-service [fbu.org.uk]
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tower-block-fire-safety-checks-10641046 [mirror.co.uk]
This being a deliberate policy for the past few years...
http://metro.co.uk/2017/06/16/government-ministers-congratulated-themselves-for-cutting-fire-regulations-6713967/ [metro.co.uk]
(For non UK readers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_safety_inspector [wikipedia.org]
"Most fire safety inspectors are uniformed officers and are professional firefighters who have transferred from front line service into the Fire Safety Department of the Fire & Rescue Service in which they work"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 26 2017, @09:49AM (1 child)
It's the same issue with all preventive safety-related jobs: If they do their task well, nothing serious happens, and therefore the bean counters think they don't need those people because nothing serious happens anyway.
(Score: 4, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 26 2017, @05:57PM
If they do their task well, nothing serious happens, and therefore the bean counters think they don't need those people because nothing serious happens anyway.
Not just bean counter... It's also the voters.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday June 26 2017, @11:19AM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 26 2017, @09:08PM
Yes because their landlords will be free to make more profits at their expense. And the great capitalist people of Rochdale love that.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by purple_cobra on Monday June 26 2017, @06:03PM (2 children)
Friend of a friend was doing some volunteer work for the local fire brigade, mainly checking/fitting smoke alarms for the elderly, so he wasn't even being paid apart from the odd hot drink. The smoke alarms were free to the elderly, as was the (volunteer) labour for fitting them, but it all fell by the wayside in the last round of funding cuts. If you hear of any cooked pensioners in the Greater Manchester area, that'll be at least in part due to your friendly Conservative government and their colossal hard-on for privatising the shit out of everything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 26 2017, @09:12PM (1 child)
Smoke detectors cost $5 each. Multiply that by 1000s of pensioners and you easily have $5000. Everyone needs to tighten their belts so the Brits can afford a new $6B aircraft carrier and Trident nuclear missiles that will SAVE BRITISH LIVES. Unlike boring smoke detectors.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Friday June 30 2017, @12:43PM
Oh, absolutely. Smoke detectors aren't sexy unless you have some very specific definition of the word. The comical part is that a lot of pensioners - those probably more likely to be found well done rather than medium rare due to lack of a smoke alarm - generally vote for the party that is cutting funding for exactly that service.
I'm sure our current major threats - terrorists who are resident in the UK, generally based in working class areas and are radicalised by what they read - are quite brown-trousered at the thought of a Trident missile landing on their terraced house in some backwater town. While the Conservative Party would love to flatten working-class areas in the name of gerrymandering, I suspect that yelling "but terrorists!" wouldn't act as a silver bullet in this instance. ;)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 26 2017, @06:53PM
> downward trend in fires and fire deaths justifies making further cuts to the fire and rescue service.
I wished they'd apply the same to terrorism. "Considering that this year far fewer people died due to terrorism than fires, anti-terror laws and spending should be drastically reduced".
Makes sense, but who (especially among UK politicians) would give up on such an opportunity to "do" something...