Posted By: borpin

Posted By: djhAnd even with all those things and a huge fire, not as many lives would have been lost if the fire escape had worked properly. If fire doors had kept smoke out of the escape passageways, if ventilation had kept the air clear, if sprinklers had been fitted, if there was more than one escape route. The list goes on and on.

My suspicion is that the failure of fire escape route (stairwell), the door into each flat (fire door), and the smoke in the stairwell were all as a result of the fire being in multiple compartments at once. The design would probably have only allowed for 2 or 3 simultaneous compartment fires (a reasonable assumption) as that was the whole basis for the fire survival system. Once there were more compartments than that, the design was overwhelmed.

Smoke leaked into the stairwell from multiple sources and the ventilation could not clear it quick enough to provide safe exit.

As to a single escape, again, if the main assumption (fire is contained in a limited number of compartments) had held, it would have worked. I'd like to know how you could have created an alternative exit route that would have worked in this case. You would still have the excessive smoke issue.

The other one is sprinklers. Sprinklers in the stairwell may have helped, but I doubt they would have triggered early enough as the issue here is more than likely to be smoke rather than heat. Sprinklers in each flat may have made the fire easier to control (smoke from outside may still have been fatal), but they are unlikely to be close enough to the outside to prevent/attenuate that part of the fire. What they may have done was to have put out the original fire but even then we do not yet know how the fire migrated between the internal and external fabric. If anything, this is the key to it all as that is where the containment initially failed.

A central fire alarm system and a 'get out' policy may have been the best route to reduce the risk of loss of life.

Posted By: djh

As to a single escape, again, if the main assumption (fire is contained in a limited number of compartments) had held, it would have worked. I'd like to know how you could have created an alternative exit route that would have worked in this case. You would still have the excessive smoke issue.

My suspicion is that you can't create another fire escape in blocks like this and the only sensible option is to knock them all down. The only possible way to do it I can think of is an external fire escape as sometimes seen in American movies, but that would have been a deathtrap unless it was completely clad in a totally fire resistant skin, and ventilated adequately.

Posted By: lineweightTherefore, if external fire spread problem is solved, the evidence would suggest that as long as compartmentation is properly enforced (ie. thoroughly checking all doors between flats and lobbies) a single escape stair strategy can be safe.

Posted By: djh

Posted By: lineweighta single escape stair strategy can be safe

So are you saying you'd be happy to live in a tower block with a single staircase?

Posted By: Simon Still

That's an interesting one. I've certainly read the claim in a number of places that most 60s/70s tower block developments in the UK didn't actually result in a particularly high population density (often lower than the housing they replaced) - they were set out with a lot of space around that was intended to be common 'parkland'. Lynsey Hansley's Estates is a good reader, also, John Grindrod's Concretopia.

Most of Europe achieves higher density than UK cities by predominantly building apartment blocks of no more than 6 stories.

Whether that holds true with modern planning I'm not sure - cities outside Europe build high blocks incredibly close together (I'm thinking of the famous shots of HongKong) but there's a good argument that the quality of life balance/density/outside space is best served European style.

Posted By: fostertomIndependent Building Control (or lack/ineffectiveness of) as the long-stop failure.