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  • one of the renovators

    That's one of my worries at the moment, that the (mostly right wing) press will try to pin the blame on one of the little people. In the way DM tried to blame a named tenant for all the Grenfell deaths.

  • I'm not sure how that is comparable. Grenfell was a terrible tragedy because of how the whole thing was built (/ clad etc.), so objectively that's what led to there being so many deaths. In the case of the Cutty Sark, yeah, someone was just an idiot and forgot to turn a vacuum cleaner off. Wooden ships tend to burn when they come in contact with lots of heat or even flames, you can't change that and there's no 'systematic' problem with it the way there was with Grenfell Tower.

  • ... an idiot and forgot to turn a vacuum cleaner off

    Or rather, an idiot management structure that didn't provide the resources for fire wardens that would walk trough the site at regular hours removing flammable debris, carrying redundant gas canisters off the premises, checking that electrical equipment not currently in use was shut off, controlling that extension cords weren't overloaded etc.

    And the vacuum cleaner operator in question might have been interrupted mid-way trough his task by a tyrannical middle manager and not even given the chance to go back to turn off the machine. S/he could have been on a zero hour contract with no chance to come back the next day to shut it off, and lacking a chain of command trough which she could report that the hoovering was only half done. Erratic management on work sites is not unheard of.

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