In the news

Apparently none of the anti-fire systems went off in the tower, no alarm, nothing. Awful.

What systems do you think exist?

In my tower we have a single smoke alarm per property. During testing it's obvious it's loud enough to be heard within a property but not beyond.

There is no central fire alarm that I know of. In my twenty years as a resident there has never been a fire drill.

We have dry risers, but they are inspected infrequently. During the fire in our building the first thing the fire brigade did was run up and down the building to check visually that no one had stolen the brass fittings and that the riser was fit to use.

There are no hoses on our floors, and the riser would be dry in any case.

There is a single fire escape staircase, which the fire brigade would want kept clear of residents as they need to go up it.

The extent of repairs to compartmentalization was to use expanding foam to seal gaps left by years of maintenance work. And a bit of MDF board near the chimney/service riser in the kitchen (near, not around).

As residents we are told there is no money for improvement. We even have scaffolding around the towers to catch the bus of concrete falling off.

Nearly all tower blocks built in the sixties across the UK are like this.

There is nothing special about Lancaster West or the Brentford Towers.

All of these old blocks had poor fire safety designed in, which overly elites on compartmentalization which has been degraded by poor maintenance.

All of this is exacerbated by councils seeking off the estates to part private entities to manage.

With a fixed income, the only scope for profit is to reduce the costs of maintenance.