London Tower Fire
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swoop42 
Whatcha gonna do when he comes for you?
Joined: 02 Aug 2008
Location: The 18
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I believe a lot of opinions in this thread are relevant and correct on all sides of the argument (why the need for arguing in the first place is somewhat depressing).
You'd be silly to assume that a building built in the the 1970's isn't part of the cause of this tragedy due to lack of multiple escape routes, sprinkler systems and fire resistant building systems you'd expect in more modern dwellings.
Likewise eye witness statements, footage from the incident and previously known fire concerns about cheap cladding appear to have caused the fire to spread far more rapidly than it otherwise would have.
One Australian eye witness I saw an interview of today seemed to back up the claims that the fire which started on the lower levels spread upwards quickly via the cladding then burnt inwards.
At the end of the day all that matters is a lot of people lost there lives in awful circumstance and authorities across the world need to learn from it and implement measures to help reduce the chances of it happening again.
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ absolutely, TP. But I doubt anyone considered they were especially or unusually unsafe when they were put up. Apparently they have been installed on lots of Melbourne Docklands apartments as well - hardly accommodation of the poor. The cladding may have been unsafe, but it appears to be common. So the political point scoring appears to me very premature.
I was responding to the pre-factual argument that that these people were somehow considered expendable by the authorities because they were poor. I suspect, though it awaits proof, that this tragedy could have occurred on any number of buildings where such modern cladding has been installed. Whether the fire regulations are inadequate, or whether the contractor did not meet them, or whether public buildings were treated differently to private accommodation, and the broader reasons why this happened, will become clearer after the inquiry. In the meantime, political point scoring is very premature.
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| swoop42 wrote: | I believe a lot of opinions in this thread are relevant and correct on all sides of the argument (why the need for arguing in the first place is somewhat depressing).
You'd be silly to assume that a building built in the the 1970's isn't part of the cause of this tragedy due to lack of multiple escape routes, sprinkler systems and fire resistant building systems you'd expect in more modern dwellings.
Likewise eye witness statements, footage from the incident and previously known fire concerns about cheap cladding appear to have caused the fire to spread far more rapidly than it otherwise would have.
One Australian eye witness I saw an interview of today seemed to back up the claims that the fire which started on the lower levels spread upwards quickly via the cladding then burnt inwards.
At the end of the day all that matters is a lot of people lost there lives in awful circumstance and authorities across the world need to learn from it and implement measures to help reduce the chances of it happening again. |
I think that's quite fair and balanced, swoop. No doubt we will understand more later. It is a horrible, horrible tragedy, but we do not yet know the causes at many levels. I prefer facts to speculation and moralizing.
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think positive 
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| Mugwump wrote: | ^ absolutely, TP. But I doubt anyone considered they were especially or unusually unsafe when they were put up. Apparently they have been installed on lots of Melbourne Docklands apartments as well - hardly accommodation of the poor. The cladding may have been unsafe, but it appears to be common. So the political point scoring appears to me very premature.
I was responding to the pre-factual argument that that these people were somehow considered expendable by the authorities because they were poor. I suspect, though it awaits proof, that this tragedy could have occurred on any number of buildings where such modern cladding has been installed. Whether the fire regulations are inadequate, or whether the contractor did not meet them, or whether public buildings were treated differently to private accommodation, and the broader reasons why this happened, will become clearer after the inquiry. In the meantime, political point scoring is very premature. |
Fair enough mate
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Skids 
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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Grenfell Tower inferno a 'disaster waiting to happen' as concerns are raised for safety of other buildings
Fears were raised that green energy concerns were prioritised ahead of safety as it emerged that cladding used to make the building more sustainable could have accelerated the fire"There has been an emerging body of evidence surrounding some of the materials being used and now we have an appalling demonstration of what can happen," he said.
Alongside the cosmetic appeal of cladding, it is used as an insulation to make buildings more sustainable to meet green energy requirements.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/14/grenfell-tower-inferno-disaster-waiting-happen-concerns-raised/
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Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| Mugwump wrote: | | One of the many cruel ironies of this disaster is that the intention of improving the living conditions of public tenants has seemingly led to this. |
Who says it was done with "the intention of improving the living conditions of public tenants"? It was done so that the rich people living in the posh towers nearby would have something nicer to look at.
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| Tannin wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | | One of the many cruel ironies of this disaster is that the intention of improving the living conditions of public tenants has seemingly led to this. |
Who says it was done with "the intention of improving the living conditions of public tenants"? It was done so that the rich people living in the posh towers nearby would have something nicer to look at. |
I understood that a new heating system was installed as well. And I think public tenants probably prefer not to live in an eyesore. In any event, best wait for the inquiry, I'd have thought. As I said, public owners and managers and operators have a good track record of killing people. i suspect it has been an appalling tragedy as a result of misappreciated risk. Having conducted a home renovation in the last ten years in London, I can assure you that there was no shortage of regulation and inspection on fire safety grounds in our property, necessitating expensive and ugly fireproof doors.
When it is all over, there will very probably be a reinforcement of the inspectorate, probably diverting finite public money away from somewhere else, whence will emerge, in time, the next disaster. I hope the lessons are focused and essential, when they are found".
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Last edited by Mugwump on Sat Jun 17, 2017 12:14 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: | A good news story about British Muslims helping their community and all you can come up with is anger at the newspaper for publishing it?
Perhaps you're right and there is a nefarious agenda at play here of "oh look, here's an opportunity to show that Muslims aren't terrible people after all". That you would get offended by that in a time when every terror attack in the west seems to prompt a debate about refugees and sentiments like this are commonplace is pretty bewildering.
Don't complain about tragedies being politicised when you and others happily politicise them all the time. As it happens, this tragedy is inherently political: just ask the residents who called for building safety standards to be improved for years but were ignored by management and local councillors. There will be a lot of political debate and fall-out as a result of this tragedy, as there should be. The small details about the quick thinking and generosity of Muslim residents and neighbours barely rate as politicisation in comparison. |
How disingenuous. When we comment on the political issues involved in repeated ideological mass murder of our children, that is "politicizing tragedy." Language is a wonderful instrument.
In next weeks Independent, "smiley school crossing lady is a Muslim".
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Sneer all you like, but there is quite clearly a certain amount of anti-Muslim prejudice in our society. As such, reminders from time to time that Muslims can be valuable, caring members of the community may help counteract that. This kind of cynicism doesn't become you.
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: | | Sneer all you like, but there is quite clearly a certain amount of anti-Muslim prejudice in our society. As such, reminders from time to time that Muslims can be valuable, caring members of the community may help counteract that. This kind of cynicism doesn't become you. |
Let me explain why I react to this. Muslims make up about 7% of the society here. We work with them, we converse with them when they drive our taxis or cut hair or do our accounts, and you cannot live in the U.K. without having some understanding of the Muslim experience. We know that the majority are perfectly decent people,as I have written perhaps fifty times in this forum. This stuff is just so patronizing to them and to us.
Unfortunately, however, Islam is also an engine of capricious and vile mass murder in my country, and we will only protect ourselves by understanding the distinction between individual Muslims on the one hand, and the public policy consequences of further enlarging an already large population who share a fierce ideology on the other. When the pro-Islam apologists in the (laughably named) Independent continue to refuse to do this, and use the Grenfell Tower tragedy to posture on it, it deserves contempt. That's not cynicism, it's just scorn placed where it is deserved, and that does become a free citizen in a land which (still, just) values the use of reason in government.
And I am sorry, but your apparent equation of an act of terrorism with a building fire as equally political tragedies is extremely disingenuous.
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Pi 
Joined: 13 Feb 2006
Location: SA
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| David wrote: | | Sneer all you like, but there is quite clearly a certain amount of anti-Muslim prejudice in our society. As such, reminders from time to time that Muslims can be valuable, caring members of the community may help counteract that. . |
perhaps i'm taking you out of context......buuut.... just for fun 
.... there is quite clearly a certain amount of anti-white male prejudice anywhere from the producers of channel 10's the Project to every social science 'studies' department on every university in the western world. sooooo.......if we highlight that a majority of the fire-fighters that went into that hell hole of a badly maintained building were mostly white males then we prove that they aren't so bad to the non objective regressive progressives that plague just about every part of the media and academia? .......no.... its "different" right?" 
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Pi = Infinite = Collingwood = Always
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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So, predictably, the tragedy is hijacked by the far Left. Sample today is the near-riot at Kensington town hall and the statement on the wall of remembrance : "you cannot treat people like animals because they live in public housing".
It is worth spending thirty seconds thought on the subject to show how truly predatory this type of thinking is, and how damaging this is to the long-term future of public housing. Any wise politician would now be drawing the lesson from this that the government should do nothing to involve itself in public housing, if they are to be vilified, before any inquiry, each time there is a failure. The long-term result, therefore, of the ideological hay-makers will be lower quality housing for "the poor" (leaving aside the problematic truth that the really poor in the UK often do not live in public housing, but in low-quality private rentals).
With regard to the inquiry, once the emotional moralizing and political advantage and legal fees have been milked, there seem to be several reasonable questions :
1. Were the fire regulations adequate ? If not, was this understood prior to this tragedy, or should it have been understood ?
2. Were the fire Regs complied with by the refurbishment project planners and contractors ? If not, were inspectorate failings or public administration funding cuts to blame for failing to detect it?
3. Were different regulatory standards in place for public housing compared to private development ?
On the published facts to date, it would seem that the issue here is poor regulation overall, not any specific deviation having taken place with regard to public housing. It is to be hoped that the vampires who descend on such cases to make opportunistic political capital from it (and marrow-sucking legal fees, of course) have not drained the capacity of the authorities to make rational and hard-headed findings about it, once the inquiry gets under way.
Notwithstanding the witch hunts, if public authorities did knowingly take unreasonable risks with the lives of the poor souls who lived in that tower block, they should be condemned and punished accordingly.
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Last edited by Mugwump on Sun Jun 18, 2017 1:03 am; edited 3 times in total |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Pi wrote: | | David wrote: | | Sneer all you like, but there is quite clearly a certain amount of anti-Muslim prejudice in our society. As such, reminders from time to time that Muslims can be valuable, caring members of the community may help counteract that. . |
perhaps i'm taking you out of context......buuut.... just for fun
.... there is quite clearly a certain amount of anti-white male prejudice anywhere from the producers of channel 10's the Project to every social science 'studies' department on every university in the western world. sooooo.......if we highlight that a majority of the fire-fighters that went into that hell hole of a badly maintained building were mostly white males then we prove that they aren't so bad to the non objective regressive progressives that plague just about every part of the media and academia? .......no.... its "different" right?" |
A lot of the positive minor news stories emerging from the recent London terror attack did involve white men, like the guy who fought off assailants bare-handed, the restaurant owner who sheltered passers-by and so on. Some would say that, because whiteness is the norm in the west and overwhelmingly what we see represented in media and entertainment, we have a default subconscious presumption that such people are white (and straight, and cisgender, etc.) until we hear otherwise, rendering any attempt to point out the presence of white males in rescue teams redundant.
You can test this for yourself: see how you reacted when you read that Christian charity groups are running donation drives for the victims of Grenfell, and then when you read that Muslim charity groups are doing the same. I suspect that for most people, one will provoke a shrug of the shoulders, whereas the other will cause at least a brief moment of surprise – because "Muslim charity" is not a concept we are often exposed to and perhaps cuts against the associations (some bad, some neutral, perhaps some good) most people have when they hear the word Muslim.
I don't see a story like the one I posted – which cuts against negative stereotypes and is, at any rate, factual – to be sinister. I understand the views of those who see it as patronisingly obvious, but when there are people on here stating quite clearly that they believe Muslims are nothing but bad news, I think those in the first group could be working a little harder to argue against the negative stereotypes being propagated by the second. It shouldn't be left to the usual suspects to push back.
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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What a spineless, heartless, gutless Tory your pitiful excuse for a PM is. Went out to get her picture taken meeting the firefighters and the police, but too afraid and too ashamed to face the actual victims.
"Security concerns", one of her drones mumbled by way of excuse.
Meanwhile the PM's boss, Her Majesty the Queen, walks amongst the victims without the slightest trace of fear, bringing sympathy and care and showing the same balance, grit and genuine compassion she has always had. Ninety-one years old and still doing her job to the very best of her ability.
If they held another election tomorrow, May would be lucky to hold her own seat, never mind win government. Never - and I really do mean never - have I seen a Prime Minister look so bad.
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ I agree, Tannin. In the very early days of her PM-ship I thought maybe she represented the British reserve and emotional restraint that I have always admired (and still do). But I have come to realise that she is just tin-eared, a bit on the spectrum and way, way below the demands of the job. See my comments on her in the U.K. election thread. She should be resigned, pronto, though it seems that all the others in the succession plan, on both sides, are badly lacking as well.
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