Grenfell Tower Fire

A huge fire has ripped through a block of flats in London. It broke out at about 1 AM this morning at Grenfell Tower in Kensington and quickly tore through the entire building. At the time of writing it is still burning slightly. Six people have been confirmed dead and over seventy in hospital. I'm very sorry to hear that people have died. Deepest condolences to their loved ones. Also I'd like to pay tribute to the emergency services, of which I used to be a part, who did their best to save those lives and then they will have the traumatic task of clearing up afterwards. The local community have rallied together and all helped Blitz-style. The cause of the fire is not yet known, but this is not the first time a major fire has happened in that building. There was also one in 2009 which killed six people. So there must have been safety concerns. Grenfell Tower was completed in 1974 so it is much newer than most buildings of its kind, but this hasn't stopped it being more hazardous. Even though it has just had a ten million pound refurbishment it was not enough to prevent the blaze. The architectural trend towards cheap and ugly high-rise accommodation in Britain began soon after World War II and faded through the 1960's, but enough blots on the landscape were thrown up in those few years to affect our city skylines to this day. The council tower block has become an icon of urban poverty. In Oxford there are plans to demolish the four that ring our city; perhaps it's time to rid ourselves of these brutalist concrete sky-dungeons forever and give people proper homes. As today has shown, when fire breaks out they are also death-traps.

The London fire brigade is searching as much of the building as they can and they have said that there is no danger of major structural collapse. This inevitably raises questions over 9/11 and the fact that this incident is a tragedy does not excuse us from thinking about any such discrepancies, nor does it make it immoral. As you can see from the newscast still above, fourteen hours after the fire started, the entire block was consumed by the fire and a lot of the panelling has burned away, but the central structure of the building is more or less intact. Conversely, on 9/11 far smaller fires in only some parts of the three towers of the World Trade Centre burned for a fraction of the time yet the buildings all completely disintegrated. Fatefully, on Sunday there was another towering inferno which the building survived. This time I'm pleased to report the whole block was successfully evacuated and there were no fatalities when flames engulfed the skyscraper in Lanzhou, China, see: https://www.rt.com/viral/391877-fire-building-china-video/. These two events are just the latest in a series of 9/11 no-shows; see the background links below for more. Will we ever see the destruction of the WTC repeated again due to a normal disaster?

See here for background: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/dubai-skyscraper-fire.html.

And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/tower-block-fire-in-russia.html.

And: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/another-wt7-no-show.html.

And: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/programme-181-podcast-andrew-johnson.html.