Tower Block fire - A real fear for people like me. I like to say that I live in a penthouse - with the bestof views across Glasgow.
My flat is fantastic, spacious and in reasonably good internal condition. I have always worried however that I couldn't escape in the case of a fire.
I too have massive concerns about those that live in my building.
Fire Doors or Decoration?
Sure my front door is fire proof for an hour, but what about the adjoining walls with my neighbours. Not all the walls are concrete. Our bathrooms are made up of plasterboard style walls. I can hear everything that takes place in my neighbours bathroom, from showering, bathing and even when they go to the toilet. There is definitely not a concrete wall between our two flats at significant points. In fact most recently when my neighbours were banging on the walls, they blew all my electrics. How is that safe? So what use is a fire proof door if the wall next door is as good as a chocolate teapot?
Fire proof maybe but what about the smoke?
There is a vent that runs through the building vertically to ventilate our bathrooms. When the people on the 16th or 17th floor are smoking weed in their flat, i can smell it in my bathroom. Should a flat below catch fire on any floor, my fireproof front door is going to be useless when the life threatening smoke comes through my bathroom vent and those vents in all the bathrooms below me.
My building IS different.
My building has two fire escapes. Both fire escapes face onto the exterior of the building, offering better opportunities for rescue. Our dry risers are checked and serviced regularly. I know because in the two years that I've lived in my flat, I've bumped into the fire department performing crisis exercises on at least two occasions. Ive seen Engineers checking the Dry Risers too.
BUT...........
I have worries about the fire doors. There have been issues with the fire doors ever since I moved into the buildings , all the doors have closing mechanisms, but they are regularly vandalised and the reasons for this I will come into later in this post.
The closing mechanisms are supposed to be soft close. In the two years that I have lived in the building the doors on my landing and the floor below slam shut. Apart from the fact that we are woken up repeatedly during the night when someone opens a door, the constant slamming subjects the frames to stress that can and has caused cracks - a huge risk to the intumescent seals that are integral to these door structures.
To get an idea of how fire doors work have a look here.
Evacuation or not?
I'ts quite interesting that the fire advice in my building says nothing about remaining in your flat, although I recall my housing officer mentioning that the flats are designed to be safe for at least an hour.The only way to know this for sure is a live test. No housing Association is going to deliberately set a flat on fire to see if it spreads, but that said, we've already had our very costly test case haven't we? At the Grenfell Tower.
Is it the same? Wrong question.
The high rise towers in our local area in Glasgow have been re-clad over the last few years and GHA have informed us that we can rest assured that the cladding on our buildings is not the same as that used in the Grenfell building.
I don't care whether the cladding is or is not the same. I care about whether the the cladding on my building is flammable. I don't care whether or not it is made by the same company or not. Even if it is made with different materials are those materials that our cladding was made with - the "bare minimum"? I really care whether the building is likely to burn. Don't try to compare oranges with apples. Ask if the the whole orchard is rotten?
Is the cladding structured in the same way, with a gap between the cladding and the building? If this is the case we have a ventilation shaft to feed a fire all around our building. Exactly the same as the Grenfell building had, and whether or not the cladding is made of different material, we run the same risk of fire spread. Fire feeds on oxygen and that will be provided with a ventilation tunnel regardless of width..
My question therefore is not only about the materials with which my building has been clad, but also the structure and design of the cladding and is my top floor flat therefore the cherry on the top that will make a pyre of human sacrifice for cost cutting?
Practical Considerations
When people seek housing they are placed into groups. I have never understood the reasoning behind placing a person in a wheelchair or with severe mobility difficulties in a high rise flat. But there are flats in the Glasgow High rises that are allocated to mobility impaired individuals because they provide a home all on one level. I can understand how the need to have a home on one level is important. I am an epileptic and risk life threatening falls if I have a seizure on the stairs. What nobody seems to think about, is how is the Group 5 (Mobility impaired) Housed individual is going to get out of their 11th floor flat down the stairs in their wheelchair?
The Grenfell case indicates that firemen could not reach flats above the 13th floor. What is also very worrying is that the fire department was unable to access critical data about the occupants of the flats when it mattered the most.
Our Housing association has a register that names every tenant and every registered occupant in their home including the children. I would like to believe that if my building caught fire, the fire department would be able to pin point really quickly which are the Group 5 flats, with occupants that cannot evacuate without help.I wonder how true this is? This is data that the fire department should have access to the moment there is a crisis in any high rise building.
Understanding Social Housing
Social Housing a bit like a chameleon and takes on a colour and a character of its own depending on how the housing is being utilised by the relative authorities. I live in a building where drug abuse and violence is commonplace.
There is a substantial provision by the GHA to the Glasgow City Council for emergency homelessness accommodation in tower blocks. While there are homeless tenants that are accommodated due to breakdown of a relationship or inability to find new accommodation after a private landlord has taken possession of a property, a huge proportion of the homeless households in the building appear to come from those that struggle to maintain a tenancy due to drug addiction and other severe social difficulties. And there are those that are released from prison that are treated as vulnerable, I was assaulted last December by a GHA tenant in an adjoining building that was out on licence. This was a completely unprovoked assault and is dealt with in a blog post elsewhere.
We have had a number of kitchen fires in our building as a result of a drug addict getting high, passing out and leaving the oven or stove on. I therefore believe that my building is particularly vulnerable to the events that took place at Grenfell Tower this week.
I don't paint my building as a den of drug addicts and criminals because we have a varied social mix. I am a digital strategist, there are nurses, tradesmen, office and retail workers that live in my building too. Just regular people with regular lives. But are we at additional risk because of the Glasgow City Councils homelessness teams failure to monitor and provide adequate support for their very vulnerable tenants in the theiir homeless flats?
Who is accountable?
Should a fire in our building be started who would be held accountable? The manufacturers of the cladding? The decision makers at the Wheatley group who then pass decision making down to city building who then pass the buck down to the GHA? And is the council responsible for the tenants that they place in the building with no risk assessment in relation to the neighbouring tenants and the housing environment.
We have violent criminals released on licence being housed next door to the disabled and those unable to fend for themselves against violent attack, How much more vulnerable are they in the event of a fire, when risks such as looting and criminal opportunity become more prevalent?
A closing thought
When I was assaulted, I had to wait over twenty five minutes for Ambulance crew after suffering a head injury, because they refused to enter the building without a police escort. It appears that my life is cheaper because I live in a tower block. It's not a great leap when it comes to considering decisions that need to be made regarding the life of the rest of us in the block particularly when we look at enforcement of fire door safety.
I live next door to a flat that has been allocated as temporary homeless accommodation. It has been nothing short of hell. Apart from the endless noise, the neighbours regularly vandalise the common area, have damaged my front door, and abused my family. I really believe these tenants are a problem because they have no long term investment in the community in which they live. They damage the fire doors repeatedly. They break the windows in the common area looking out across the golf course.
Does the Housing Association care? Who knows. We have a window that has been hanging open on the top floor for MONTHS, despite repeated reporting,
After all I only live on the top floor in a building with no sprinklers and no external fire alarms, new cladding and dogged with anti social behaviour - What kind of risk could I possibly be at.?
I work, I pay tax, I obey the law....and because of where I live, I matter less. That's the bottom line.
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