Talking fire ratings.
I'm no expert , but due to responsibilities had to learn some.

Thirty seven years ago , I got to know a specialist tradesman.
Fire walls in commercial and residential buildings , even back then required a minimum four hour rating.

He could get a six hour rating with plastered lath walls.
I bought 30+ sheets of lath off him.

about ten years ago we had to move a fire wall (wooden frame) ,
to widen the stairwell , between ground and 1st , top floor ,
it had two layers of 1" (25mm) fireproof
plasterboard , staggered , so that even the joints didn't provide a passage , if they failed.

So there is nothing new or difficult about (the principle of or ability to) restricting the spread of fire and smoke.
The same applies to fire and smokestop doors.

 

Government 'faces £600m cladding safety bill after Grenfell Tower disaster'
25 June 2017 • 8:49pm

The fire is believed to have killed at least 79, police have said.

The Government faces an estimated bill of more than £600m for replacing flammable cladding on housing blocks after the Grenfell Tower disaster.

Sixty blocks have so far failed cladding fire safety checks - every one tested so far - with another 540 still to be looked at.

Industry experts told the Telegraph the cost of replacing the cladding on each block would top £1m and costs would spiral far higher if residents had to be evacuated during building work.


Residents leave the Taplow tower block on the Chalcots Estate in Camden, London, as the building is evacuated in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire Credit: Stefan Rousseau/PA
Camden Council on Sunday said around one-in-five households it was trying to evacuate from four blocks in north London were refusing to leave.

The council said around 200 people were staying put despite being advised “in the strongest possible terms” to move into alternative accommodation because of safety concerns.

The London borough said it had already put aside £500,000 to pay for hotel bills for residents while safety work is carried out on the blocks.

Towers evacuated after concerns following Grenfell tower fire 01:08

Meanwhile plans to test every hospital for fire safety in the wake of the fire that is presumed to have killed at least 79 were in chaos after fire chiefs told hospital leaders they did not have the resources to carry out the inspections.

NHS watchdogs had instructed every hospital to arrange safety checks by local fire services by the end of the weekend, but senior officers from the country's nine fire services said they were not consulted and could not meet the request.


One NHS trust chief executive told Health Service Journal there was “chaos” in the capital, with London Fire Brigade refusing to carry out checks because of the volume of work it was already undertaking in the wake of the Grenfell disaster.

Another NHS chief executive said the unprecedented orders - telling trusts to arrange checks of every inpatient faculty within 36 hours - had fallen into NHS spam filters, leaving many hospital managers unaware of the urgent demands.

A trust chief executive in the east of England said local fire services had heard nothing about the orders, until hospitals began contacting them, and were already inundated with safety checks on residential blocks.

The confusion came as it was disclosed the Government faces a bill of as much as £600m to replace dangerous flammable cladding on housing blocks.

Sixty tower blocks around the country have so far failed fire safety tests in the wake of the June 15 blaze.

Simon Taylor, who has fitted cladding to 25 local authority tower blocks as director of a Yorkshire-based company called Northern Heights, said: “You can work on £1m each.”



“It's not just the cladding but the scaffolding, it's about access, taking it down, remaking it, redesigning and putting it back again.”


The cost could rise because of insurance worries after the Grenfell Tower fire.

Stephen Ledbetter, former director of the Centre for Window and Cladding Technology, estimated it would be roughly £1.2m to re-clad a tower block the size of Grenfell.

The Government said high-rise buildings in 25 local authorities across the country have now failed fire cladding safety tests.

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) said Doncaster, Norwich, Stockton-on-Tees and Sunderland all had buildings that failed tests, while Manchester, Plymouth and Portsmouth have already been named.


Shadow chancellor John McDonnell (left) has claimed the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire were murdered by political decisions. Credit: Claire Hayhurst/PA
Islington, Lambeth and Wandsworth joined Barnet, Brent, Camden and Hounslow on the growing list of London boroughs, while 11 other areas are yet to be named.

A social housing provider in Liverpool announced it has decided to remove cladding from two of its high-rise blocks as a precaution, following Government tests.

In a statement, One Vision Housing said results showed "certain elements of the cladding" on Cygnet House and Wren House in the Bootle area of the city, "whilst meeting building regulations does not meet the latest DCLG test criteria".

The safety lab carrying carrying out tests said on Friday it could check 100 samples each day, but after two days, only 60 had been submitted and tested.


Whitehall sources said they were calling on councils to speed up sending samples for testing.

John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor, meanwhile alleged during an appearance at Glastonbury festival that the victims of the fire were murdered by political decisions.

The MP for Hayes and Harlington said: “Those families, those individuals - 79 so far and there will be more - were murdered by political decisions that were taken over recent decades.

"The decision not to build homes and to view housing as only for financial speculation rather than for meeting a basic human need made by politicians over decades murdered those families.

"The decision to close fire stations and to cut 10,000 firefighters and then to freeze their pay for over a decade contributed to those deaths inevitably and they were political decisions."

Meanwhile emails sent to and from Arconic, the US manufacturer of the cladding used on Grenfell Tower, raised questions over why the company supplied combustible material, despite publicly warning such panels were a fire risk for tall buildings.

According to the 2014 emails seen by the Reuters news agency, firms bidding to refurbish the tower asked about samples of five different types of Reynobond aluminium-covered panels, each one one apparently using a core only recommended for lower buildings.


Diagrams in a 2016 Arconic brochure describe how panels with a polyethylene core are suitable up to 10m in height. Panels with a fire-resistant core can be used up to 30m, while above that height, panels with a different non-combustible core should be used, the brochure says.

Grenfell Tower is more than 60m tall.

The brochure also warned that cladding can be a fire risk.

It said: "When conceiving a building, it is crucial to choose the adapted products in order to avoid the fire to spread to the whole building. Especially when it comes to facades and roofs, the fire can spread extremely rapidly.

“As soon as the building is higher than the fire fighters’ ladders, it has to be conceived with an incombustible material."

The emails show Arconic’s factory in Merxheim, France, responded to requests on the availability of samples of five different types of panel, all of which were only available in the combustible first two varieties.

In the end, Arconic said it had supplied polyethylene panels. A spokesman declined to say if the firm had known how tall Grenfell Tower was.

A statement said: “While we publish general usage guidelines, regulations and codes vary by country and need to be determined by the local building code experts.”

 

I don't think there is anything to gain by using bullshit emotive claptrap.

Under British and British based law ,
to qualify as murder ,
there has to be intent.

Emotive exaggeration under some circumstances , could be considered incitement , is another reason to chose wording carefully.

Many are undoubtedly culpable on many levels , and some may even meet the standard of manslaughter ,
but very unlikely any will reach the standard of intentional homicide.

Manslaughter with reckless or carless disregard , bribery and corruption ,
and the like , should put some away for a good term , but even that may be hard to prove .
Speculating won't help.

Bullshit won't help ,
and may prove delaying , and or counter productive.

It pays to remember , the cause of the fire was a refrigerator.
If that finding stands , there is not even a hint of a suspicion there was any intent on anyone's part , in the cause of the fire.

 

Why ?

London's two high reach appliances were not dispatched to the fire until half an hour after the initial response.
WTF
You get a call to a high rise tower block , why wouldn't they be amongst the very first sent to the scene ?

I believe the biggest can reach 90m.
That might quite conceivably made a difference to lives lost.
We'll never know.

It is a most disturbing failure when minutes matter.

 

Meanwhile.
Just reported.
London's Camden market is burning at this moment.
No reports of casualties ,
but it looks like a fair sized blaze.

 

Camden fire now reported as under control ,
and no casualties.

 

The fire department was still telling people to stay in their flats (in the tower)
1 hour and 52 minutes after it was reported.

Mind you , by then , near 2 hours in , it probably would have been impossible to get down.

Did any of those told to stay , who did , survive ?
so far I've only heard from survivors who ignored the advice

 

Sadly, it looks like about two dozen infidels perished in the fire.

 

Now exposed.
The manufacturers
deliberately mislead everybody
about the cladding used in the Grenfell Tower.

They had a report that stated their cladding panels were
10 times more flammable
than standard panels.

Copy of report was basically labelled that it must be kept secret
at all costs.

They knew full well

they were supplying a product that could turn

any high rise building into a blazing death trap.
* * *

A technical manager at the maker of the Grenfell Tower cladding told colleagues
poor fire test results on the product
needed to be kept "very confidential".

The request, in capital letters,
was in an email sent in 2010
and produced at the public inquiry into the 2017 fire.