The 21st floor
September 27, 2017 4:05 PM Subscribe
“I am not sleeping too well at the moment and that’s because all those things keep running through my head,” says Marcio. But his actions on the night were key to their escape. He was calm and organised, filling the bath, wetting towels, giving clear instructions to the others about how they might make it out of the building. Six of the seven people who escaped from the 21st floor that night did so under his guidance. - Interviews with and the stories of people who did and didn't escape from the 21st story of Grenfell Tower. (previously)
Amazing and heartbreaking. I hope they can find some peace.
posted by mogget at 6:12 PM on September 27, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by mogget at 6:12 PM on September 27, 2017 [1 favorite]
Jesus, I consider myself someone who deals well with immediate crisis, but yeah, that situation had no clear answer by that point.
(I say it that way because it seems the building didn't have sprinklers, which would have almost certainly drastically reduced the severity of the fire, so there was a perfectly obvious preventative measure that could have been taken)
posted by wierdo at 9:49 PM on September 27, 2017
(I say it that way because it seems the building didn't have sprinklers, which would have almost certainly drastically reduced the severity of the fire, so there was a perfectly obvious preventative measure that could have been taken)
posted by wierdo at 9:49 PM on September 27, 2017
She was at seven months. Irrespective of how you feel about the subject, it was clearly a baby to them. If your friend had a stillbirth that far along I doubt you'd tell them it wasn't really a baby. Let grieving people grieve in their own way.
Thank you for posting this. So the system failed them not only in abdicating any responsibility for fire safety, but in telling them to stay put when they should escape. It reminds me of people in the WTC who didn't try to escape because they were originally advised to stay in place.
posted by Anonymous at 9:50 PM on September 27, 2017
Thank you for posting this. So the system failed them not only in abdicating any responsibility for fire safety, but in telling them to stay put when they should escape. It reminds me of people in the WTC who didn't try to escape because they were originally advised to stay in place.
posted by Anonymous at 9:50 PM on September 27, 2017
I wish the BBC wouldn't do that trendy thing where the tect scrolls over sliding pictures. It literally makes me feel nauseated and I can't read the article. I can't even put it into reading mode. Heaven knows what people who use screen-scrapers or other assistive devices do.
If anyone knows of a plaintext version of this, please let me know.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:18 PM on September 27, 2017 [3 favorites]
If anyone knows of a plaintext version of this, please let me know.
posted by Joe in Australia at 11:18 PM on September 27, 2017 [3 favorites]
Joe in Australia: in Firefox: View > Page Style > No Style gives you just the text and pictures, with all CSS trickery disabled.
posted by MartinWisse at 12:00 AM on September 28, 2017 [9 favorites]
posted by MartinWisse at 12:00 AM on September 28, 2017 [9 favorites]
I simply cannot fathom what it must be like to be in an flat high above the ground in a building that is on fire, and have the firefighters telling you "don't come down, someone will come" while your friends outside are saying "get out, it's your only chance". And you have to make that call on behalf of your family and neighbors who are stranded with you.
I'd rather die trying to flee than trapped in place
posted by thelonius at 12:45 AM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]
I'd rather die trying to flee than trapped in place
posted by thelonius at 12:45 AM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]
It is a complete fucking scandal how few of the families have been properly rehomed. Not a surprise, but still a complete fucking scandal.
posted by threetwentytwo at 1:50 AM on September 28, 2017 [12 favorites]
posted by threetwentytwo at 1:50 AM on September 28, 2017 [12 favorites]
The fire services telling people to stay put sounds awful, and in retrospect really was awful, but it is (or, well, was, nobody's going to stay put now) standard procedure in high-rise fires. The idea is that fires aren't supposed to be able to spread from flat to flat inside the building, so you're safer in your own flat with fire doors than you are in smoke-filled stairwells. But those procedures depend on buildings that are built and maintained with fire regulations that actually enable this, unlike, clearly, Grenfell.
I don't want to be too pessimistic about the inquiry already but I feel like the national conversation around this is already in a sense becoming a second Hillsborough. Initial horror, which rapidly starts getting tempered with a series of "ah, well, yes it was awful but..."s. ("But, nobody knew the cladding was so flammable. But, the tenants didn't complain specifically about the cladding when they complained about fire safety. But, eh, tenants, they complain all the time, you know? But, maybe flats were being illegally sublet. But, we can't just hand houses out to people, it's very sad that these people may have lost all their worldly possessions and half their families and be left with lifelong trauma but there's a queue!" and on and on and on). Which will then take decades of campaigning before we come back round to the horror and the perspective of this should not have happened. Because it shouldn't.
posted by Catseye at 4:06 AM on September 28, 2017 [18 favorites]
I don't want to be too pessimistic about the inquiry already but I feel like the national conversation around this is already in a sense becoming a second Hillsborough. Initial horror, which rapidly starts getting tempered with a series of "ah, well, yes it was awful but..."s. ("But, nobody knew the cladding was so flammable. But, the tenants didn't complain specifically about the cladding when they complained about fire safety. But, eh, tenants, they complain all the time, you know? But, maybe flats were being illegally sublet. But, we can't just hand houses out to people, it's very sad that these people may have lost all their worldly possessions and half their families and be left with lifelong trauma but there's a queue!" and on and on and on). Which will then take decades of campaigning before we come back round to the horror and the perspective of this should not have happened. Because it shouldn't.
posted by Catseye at 4:06 AM on September 28, 2017 [18 favorites]
In years gone by, a disaster like this would have at least spurred changes to the fire code. It seems that years of demonizing the poor has finally tipped the scales all the way over to "fuck 'em, it's their own fault they lived in a death trap."
Maybe nobody knew that the particular materials used in this building were as flammable as it turned out to be. That doesn't in any way change the necessity of ensuring that similarly constructed buildings are fixed and whatever other lessons learned are applied to future construction. It all seems a bit weird to me, though, since even the smaller cities I've lived in have required fire sprinklers in all new high rise construction since the 50s and required older buildings be retrofitted with exterior fire escapes if there are residences in an existing building without sprinklers not long after. I'm sure it's much less easy to police in places where there are more high rises, though.
posted by wierdo at 4:29 AM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]
Maybe nobody knew that the particular materials used in this building were as flammable as it turned out to be. That doesn't in any way change the necessity of ensuring that similarly constructed buildings are fixed and whatever other lessons learned are applied to future construction. It all seems a bit weird to me, though, since even the smaller cities I've lived in have required fire sprinklers in all new high rise construction since the 50s and required older buildings be retrofitted with exterior fire escapes if there are residences in an existing building without sprinklers not long after. I'm sure it's much less easy to police in places where there are more high rises, though.
posted by wierdo at 4:29 AM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]
The fire services telling people to stay put sounds awful, and in retrospect really was awful, but it is (or, well, was, nobody's going to stay put now) standard procedure in high-rise fires. The idea is that fires aren't supposed to be able to spread from flat to flat inside the building, so you're safer in your own flat with fire doors than you are in smoke-filled stairwells. But those procedures depend on buildings that are built and maintained with fire regulations that actually enable this, unlike, clearly, Grenfell.
In Toronto, we had a similar disaster about 20-25 years ago - only in that case, it was that many people died because they left their apartments and were suffocated in the stairwells, I think (my memory is vague - please correct me if wrong). After that, it was mandatory to install alarms in the apartments that could also transmit instructions.
(unfortunately the alarms were miscalculated and far too loud - and went off frequently - kids, drug dealers. My uncle had to build us a sound-dampening box to spare us from the volume - which muffled the words and I'm sure wasn't great. But it was so many decibels that it was painful to be around.)
posted by jb at 5:52 AM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]
In Toronto, we had a similar disaster about 20-25 years ago - only in that case, it was that many people died because they left their apartments and were suffocated in the stairwells, I think (my memory is vague - please correct me if wrong). After that, it was mandatory to install alarms in the apartments that could also transmit instructions.
(unfortunately the alarms were miscalculated and far too loud - and went off frequently - kids, drug dealers. My uncle had to build us a sound-dampening box to spare us from the volume - which muffled the words and I'm sure wasn't great. But it was so many decibels that it was painful to be around.)
posted by jb at 5:52 AM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]
Catseye, a big part of why I posted this is because it's so important to make the narrative about these being real people whose flats burned down. And especially seeing the beautiful interior photos of the Gomes and Gebremeskel families' flats, plus the £1800/month private rented flat that looks so familiar to most people in the UK who are young and moderately well paid, because it's exactly what we spend 30% of our income on. I think the humanisation is exactly what we need in order to make sure that there is a response which goes further than "oh, these panels never met the standards. That was careless."
Especially as there were other non-cladding related faults found both in Grenfell and in the wider housing stock, such as the Ledbury Estate in Peckham, which was never strengthened to avoid pancaking if there was a gas explosion.
The lack of sprinklers is definitely a symptom of institutional contempt for the residents. The history of large system built concrete estates is one where the philosophy was to move communities wholesale from compact streets of (dilapidated) terraced houses (row houses) to new planned estates, with very little thought to re-establishing community norms. So a lot of initial involvement by the management was around reducing false alarms (frequent triggering of sprinklers would be costly and inconvenient) rather than actual fire safety.
In terms of having a single stairwell, partly this was due to inexcusable reasons of cost, and partly to reduce the ability of people committing public nuisances or crimes to escape, also a dereliction of duty by the policing services, obviously. But there would've been one more factor on the designers of fire safety plans at that time: one of Britain's biggest civilian disasters of the period 1940-1960 was the Bethnal Green tube station crush, where 173 people were killed on the stairway into Bethnal Green tube station as they attempted to enter it to use as an air raid shelter. So panicked crowds on stairwells were high in people's minds (rather than the high rise hotel fires that had been so devastating in the US at that time).
And now I feel like anyone who reads this will know more about the history of high rise fire safety in the UK than whoever said "ah, the plastic's covered by aluminium, how would that be a fire risk?", and bought the cheaper cladding. Despite the fact that in Scotland, everyone had known of the danger after one person was avoidably killed in a high rise fire that spread flat to flat.
Anyway, I'm sick of having to know more about how everything's made than the professionals do. When can I start trusting institutions again?
I wish for recovery for everyone who survived, and ..... for the El Wahabi family. And I'm thankful that I get to picture more of the enormity of this event. Long may we fight to stop this happening.
posted by ambrosen at 6:15 AM on September 28, 2017 [13 favorites]
Especially as there were other non-cladding related faults found both in Grenfell and in the wider housing stock, such as the Ledbury Estate in Peckham, which was never strengthened to avoid pancaking if there was a gas explosion.
The lack of sprinklers is definitely a symptom of institutional contempt for the residents. The history of large system built concrete estates is one where the philosophy was to move communities wholesale from compact streets of (dilapidated) terraced houses (row houses) to new planned estates, with very little thought to re-establishing community norms. So a lot of initial involvement by the management was around reducing false alarms (frequent triggering of sprinklers would be costly and inconvenient) rather than actual fire safety.
In terms of having a single stairwell, partly this was due to inexcusable reasons of cost, and partly to reduce the ability of people committing public nuisances or crimes to escape, also a dereliction of duty by the policing services, obviously. But there would've been one more factor on the designers of fire safety plans at that time: one of Britain's biggest civilian disasters of the period 1940-1960 was the Bethnal Green tube station crush, where 173 people were killed on the stairway into Bethnal Green tube station as they attempted to enter it to use as an air raid shelter. So panicked crowds on stairwells were high in people's minds (rather than the high rise hotel fires that had been so devastating in the US at that time).
And now I feel like anyone who reads this will know more about the history of high rise fire safety in the UK than whoever said "ah, the plastic's covered by aluminium, how would that be a fire risk?", and bought the cheaper cladding. Despite the fact that in Scotland, everyone had known of the danger after one person was avoidably killed in a high rise fire that spread flat to flat.
Anyway, I'm sick of having to know more about how everything's made than the professionals do. When can I start trusting institutions again?
I wish for recovery for everyone who survived, and ..... for the El Wahabi family. And I'm thankful that I get to picture more of the enormity of this event. Long may we fight to stop this happening.
posted by ambrosen at 6:15 AM on September 28, 2017 [13 favorites]
There are people on the Kensington and Chelsea Council who should be in prison for this.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 6:23 AM on September 28, 2017 [6 favorites]
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 6:23 AM on September 28, 2017 [6 favorites]
There are people on the Kensington and Chelsea Council who should be in prison for this.
These people would straighten up very fast if their greedy, reckless, selfish, classist decisions could land them in jail. They do it because they can.
Honestly, you read something like this and it starts to give you Leninist sympathies.
posted by Frowner at 8:43 AM on September 28, 2017 [2 favorites]
Local government budgets in the UK have been cut by an average of 22% since 2010, with the cuts falling disproportionately on those representing and responsible for disadvantaged areas.
In the UK, local government is responsible for making sure your homes are safe, your food is safe, your granny gets cared for and fed, your communities are properly planned, drug addicts and alcoholics get treatment, vulnerable children are cared for, new mothers get help and support, schoolkids get their vaccinations, the air we breathe is as clean as possible, etc., etc. It does all this with varying degrees of efficiency and efficacy. But take away 20%+ of any service's funding and its efficacy will have to fall.
I don't say this to excuse Kensington and Chelsea. I say this because I am both terrified and certain that this will not be the last incident like this. Everything gets commissioned out, because that's ostensibly cheaper - but those contract values take no account of the costs of oversight and enforcement. No good having a beautifully drawn up contract or set of planning permission obligations if there's no-one left at the council to make sure those provisions actually happen.
As the Economist article demonstrates, cuts to planning have been particularly deep - it's not a front line service, its outcomes are mostly non-immediate and invisible compared to social care or waste collection. So developers will get away with ignoring regulations and building shoddily.
Meanwhile, corporation tax goes ever down, the top rate of income tax drops, and HMRC continues to employ orders of magnitude more staff to prosecute benefit fraudsters than to pursue tax avoiders.
I have no doubt that there were specific failings within Kensington & Chelsea. But this is also a systemic issue resulting from central government decisions. Grenfell was the most visibly horrendous result of those decisions that we know about. However, it was not the first and it will not be the last.
posted by aihal at 10:53 AM on September 28, 2017 [3 favorites]
In the UK, local government is responsible for making sure your homes are safe, your food is safe, your granny gets cared for and fed, your communities are properly planned, drug addicts and alcoholics get treatment, vulnerable children are cared for, new mothers get help and support, schoolkids get their vaccinations, the air we breathe is as clean as possible, etc., etc. It does all this with varying degrees of efficiency and efficacy. But take away 20%+ of any service's funding and its efficacy will have to fall.
I don't say this to excuse Kensington and Chelsea. I say this because I am both terrified and certain that this will not be the last incident like this. Everything gets commissioned out, because that's ostensibly cheaper - but those contract values take no account of the costs of oversight and enforcement. No good having a beautifully drawn up contract or set of planning permission obligations if there's no-one left at the council to make sure those provisions actually happen.
As the Economist article demonstrates, cuts to planning have been particularly deep - it's not a front line service, its outcomes are mostly non-immediate and invisible compared to social care or waste collection. So developers will get away with ignoring regulations and building shoddily.
Meanwhile, corporation tax goes ever down, the top rate of income tax drops, and HMRC continues to employ orders of magnitude more staff to prosecute benefit fraudsters than to pursue tax avoiders.
I have no doubt that there were specific failings within Kensington & Chelsea. But this is also a systemic issue resulting from central government decisions. Grenfell was the most visibly horrendous result of those decisions that we know about. However, it was not the first and it will not be the last.
posted by aihal at 10:53 AM on September 28, 2017 [3 favorites]
I have no doubt that there were specific failings within Kensington & Chelsea.
To give Kensington & Chelsea the contempt that they're due, they have extremely atypical finances, and actually are returning a surplus. So while it's true that the UK in general is regressing at an unacceptably large rate in part due to austerity, the reason for this huge government failure is straightforward dereliction of duty.
posted by ambrosen at 11:59 AM on September 28, 2017 [7 favorites]
To give Kensington & Chelsea the contempt that they're due, they have extremely atypical finances, and actually are returning a surplus. So while it's true that the UK in general is regressing at an unacceptably large rate in part due to austerity, the reason for this huge government failure is straightforward dereliction of duty.
posted by ambrosen at 11:59 AM on September 28, 2017 [7 favorites]
aihal, thanks for that explanation. Local government seems like it typically does much less here in the US, with a few major exceptions. Funny thing about it is that budget issues are also a major issue for local and state governments over here, but one of the things that they always seem to do relatively well is planning. They may make decisions I think are stupid due to differences in priorities, but they somehow always seem to find the money for that and enforcement of the building code even as they stop funding parks and police and fire services. (The latter probably because it is self funding through fines, the former is partially funded by the feds, but they also fund lots of things like transit that still get savagely cut any time there are budget shortfalls)
posted by wierdo at 3:26 PM on September 28, 2017
posted by wierdo at 3:26 PM on September 28, 2017
wierdo, I'd say that while local government in the UK does deliver a lot of government services, there's actually almost zero legislative power in local government, and not a huge amount of room for discretion. But they should be enforcing building codes, amongst other law.
posted by ambrosen at 10:07 AM on September 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by ambrosen at 10:07 AM on September 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
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I want to make this abstract, to distance myself from empathy. Take the view from orbit, where I talk about building codes, and the dangers of high-rise accommodation, and inquests, and Tories. But instead I can't stop thinking about Marcio's beautiful flat slowly filling with smoke. Great article, thanks for posting.
posted by um at 5:14 PM on September 27, 2017 [9 favorites]