In the news

This is a given.

Fingers crossed. In a small bit of good news, the centres I went to were overstocked with supplies and help.

Yes lots of support and calmness in the vicinity. The expected masses of media vans. Acrid smell around a large area. Many vehicles and people on foot carrying clothes and food to the drop off centres. people relating stories from the night to small groups. Still some fire visible in the windows of the burnt shell.

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reports on bbclondon of news film crews trying to muscle in on grieving families for a scoop, one's had their camera smashed to bits by the local mandem, and rightly so.

reports on bbclondon of news film crews trying to muscle in on grieving families for a scoop, one's had their camera smashed to bits by the local mandem, and rightly so.

Reports from journalists on scene at the time were that they were asked to move on, and one crew didn't move on quickly enough.

Completely understand the sentiment - it seems voyeuristic to film a situation like this. There's always a delicacy to covering tragedies. Maybe some people on the ground got it wrong, and if they were overly intrusive, then that was definitely a stupid, insensitive thing to do that they shouldn't have done.

But there's a balance to be struck. Without coverage of the tragedy, we're unlikely to see the political pressure build enough for the government to take action to ensure something like this doesn't happen again. And images are much more effective at conveying news than words.

and shoving a camera in a grieving persons face is going to result in you getting banged.

Hey Howard, we were going to drive over tonight with some clothing and non-perishables. Do you think it's worth it or are they oversubscribed?

stay away lads - loads of road closures and they have more stuff than they know what to do with.

I don't know - at the centres they had what they needed but that might have been for the short term only - I'd find out if Kensington Town Hall are still accepting donations - check twitter and Facebook.

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

A late reply admittedly but...

Wet risers and hoses were done away with a long time ago due to the risk of Legionella breeding in stagnant water.

Doesn't help the current situation I know but that's why.

Thanks, just checked, nothing more needed for the time being

Just took my family on a fire safety tour of our flats (only 4 stories). Found 50% of our fire extinguishers in cabinets locked shut with stupid plastic keys. Stops them being stolen but I'm damn sure my neighbours would be able to break them open like I just did.

Do you really think that there will not be enough coverage of individuals suffering in the aftermath of this to cause some change?

I really struggle to understand why the media can't just leave well alone in the immediate aftermath. Cover the bigger incident, and be open to people seeking you out to talk, but don't go around sticking a camera in peoples faces for a few days

The media should be camped outside Gavin Barwell's house, looking through parliamentary records, investigative journalism. This would serve the public better.

I hate it so much that something like this always seems to have to happen for anything to get better (or will it?). That doesn't just apply to the deaths of people in fires and the destruction of their homes, of course, but just about right across the board.

The trouble is a lot of the time it's only in the public eye for a short time and then it's on to the next fad.

There was the African warlord a few years back (I can't even remember the country, never mind the name), the girls kidnapped by Boko Haran, the Times cycling campaign, ...

Joseph Kony of the LRA in Uganda?

I've been over really dreary technical specs and info of some cladding in my old job. The main issue I could see with it is that usually the cladding has a gap of 1/2 foot or so between the main part of the cladding and the old outside wall, in a way it's like building a chimney along/around the outside wall as the heat from a fire will rise up inside the cladding ignoring the fire breaks of floor/ceiling rather than hitting the next floor up and the heat dispersing away from the outside wall into the air. The material the cladding is made of being flamable will make that loads worse but it's that awful design which does it more than anything.

It's well documented, google image search had a pic within a couple of results.

Using it for vanity is a growing and worrying trend, when you pair it with some other awful just barely legal ways of building you get a total deathtrap and sometimes a building that on paper ticks all the boxes but in reality doesn't give anyone a chance.

Hearing some truely awful stories come out, one that's going to stick with me is a baby thrown from a 10th floor window and survived but if the parents made it(or will survive the smoke inhalation) who knows.

I don't mean it in terms of the media's attention span but bad public administration that means things like this are done wrongly or neglected. I've seen it in a number of areas and it's very frustrating.

There should be firestops in that cavity behind the cladding so there are no voids bridging compartment floors (or walls but floors more important). That's pretty basic.
(The cladding itself should also not be easily combustible)

The news cycle moves very quickly, and these things can drop out of the public eye if they're not covered. I said that I accept that the journalists in question may have gone too far in this case. But it's hard to know where the line is - I posted some academic studies earlier in this thread that went into the issue and showed that some people feel like their plight is being ignored if it's not covered. And I distinctly remember the media being heavily criticised in this thread for not covering things that people here wanted to be all over the news.

It's a damned difficult job to do, and we don't always get it right. I don't get why we deserve so much blanket hate, though.

I've been over really dreary technical specs and info of some cladding in my old job. The main issue I could see with it is that usually the cladding has a gap of 1/2 foot or so between the main part of the cladding and the old outside wall, in a way it's like building a chimney along/around the outside wall as the heat from a fire will rise up inside the cladding ignoring the fire breaks of floor/ceiling rather than hitting the next floor up and the heat dispersing away from the outside wall into the air.

According to the Piers-Myers paper linked to by @Slascha in https://www.lfgss.com/comments/13689347/, UK building regs require there to be a cavity barrier at the level of every floor, and at every internal wall, precisely to limit that chimney effect.

(OK, it's a method given in the Approved Document as a means of meeting the requirement for the external construction to resist the spread of fire across the face of the building, but although you can choose to use a different method, you'd better be able to show that it's sufficiently effective.)

(@hoefla saying pretty much the same thing.)

From what I can tell a large chunk of cladding people claim the cavity will be filled with insulation in such a way it's portrayed as solid and the cavity full which is clearly utter bs. I'm unsure but have a feeling claddings original uses as a temporary repair to a damaged wall dodge around some regs by placing it similar to scaffolding.

What seems to be clear to everyone outside of the media bubble is that there are two different levels of story here.

There is a public tragedy, which encompasses 12 known deaths, underfunding of fire precautions, and potential issues with cladding, and a very intimate private tragedy of both those who have lost loved ones, and those who have lost their homes and might never feel safe living in a flat again.

No one is criticising the media for covering the first part - that is their remit. Instead people are criticising the media for focusing blindly on the second part, even when it is clearly unwelcome. There is a perception that the news cycle moves quickly because the media have learned that personal tragedies sell issues, so they focus on one persons tragedy until it is played out and then move on to the next, rather than actually do any journalism on the public front.

You say it is hard to know where the line is on something like this. I would posit that it is clear to anyone with any degree of empathy that in a situation like this, the line is pretty far away from people suffering unless they explicitly invite you over it.

If you wanted to stick your camera in someones nose, Gavin Barwell seems a prime target and might actually unearth something relevant to the public tragedy.

I'm not really up for speculating, just pointing out that building regs does highlight these kinds of risks (fire spreading between compartments) and should prevent it. And that it's basic construction knowledge.

I think everyone involved in building construction (and maintenance) is feeling horribly uneasy and asking themselves if this could've happened on their watch, could they have contributed, directly or through inaction or negligence. It seems self-centred but it's on my mind.