Fire Engines Photos

A dramatic and very unfortunate example of the fact that even an army of ultra long aerials cannot always overcome a situation where building and fire codes are inadequate.

Because implementing adequate codes - and retrofitting non-compliant structures - is so expensive, cities in many countries rely on increasingly gigantic aerials to deal with fires in buildings like this.

It may help some of the time, but it is clearly an imperfect solution.

Added by Rob Johnson on 26 September 2020.

This argument applies to Grenfell of course. The public enquiry is gradually unpicking piece by piece the way deregulation in Britain has undermined fire safety. London's one 64m aerial, which is still not on the run, seems hardly relevant. Grenfell was not a failure of fire fighting, but governance at many levels.

Added by Petros on 27 September 2020.

Comment removed at request of Commentor

Petros:
If you read LFB's own investigative reports, which are available on their website, it is clear that there were failures when it came to LFB preplanning, response and command and control too. But the design of the building was compromised to begin with, and the manner and materials used in the renovation certainly made matters much worse.

I am not sure what has been done, if anything, to beef up London fire codes or code enforcement, but let's hope some good comes out of this disaster so a repeat of any such event is avoided. LFB is taking steps to improve pre-planning, response, command and firefighter training specifically to improve how they approach and handle high rise incidents. These are also outlined on their website, but all of these efforts cannot completely overcome problems of unsafe construction if these are not corrected.

Added by Rob Johnson on 27 September 2020.

Gentlemen, I definitely do agree that giant aerials are not the solutions to high-rise fires and first hand have seen situations in which these trucks could not simply become operational due to their size and weight. However, I have also seen them in action where they literally saved lives, during rescue operations. If a city can afford them, they should unquestionably have some in the fleet.

Added by Amir Moradian on 27 September 2020.

It is reported that the Iranian government identified 22 serious violations of building and fire codes at the Plasco Tower.

But all of these were identified only after the fire and collapse, a situation echoed by what happened at the Grenfell Tower.

This simply does not need to happen. As one of our CFD Batallion Chiefs at our local station put it "there's no safer place to live than in a high rise apartment building like yours."

This was borne out a couple of weeks ago when there was an occupied apartment fire on the 32nd floor in the wee hours. It was confined to the apartment of origin, and six occupants were all rescued and taken to hospital for smoke inhalation.

The CFD attendance comprised over 150 members including eleven paramedic ambulance crews. Two floors above the fire were evacuated, everyone else sheltered in place.

Added by Rob Johnson on 27 September 2020.

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