Market economies are a choice,
not something humanity requires, pic.twitter.com/E9iEzwyjf3— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) June 16, 2017
Count on Megan McArglebargle to act as point-person for the Worst Glibertarian Hot Take. For those of us who aren’t being paid to prioritize money over humanity, here’s Justin Davidson, in NYMag, “Could the Grenfell Tower Disaster Happen in New York?”
There is no such thing as an accident when a high-rise building fails. If gas leaks, wires spark, or a wall crumbles, those are not acts of fate, but the preventable consequence of people not doing their jobs. Terminology matters; if it turned out that the fire that consumed Grenfell Tower in London, killing at least 30 people (and probably many more), had been set by a radicalized Muslim immigrant or an anti-Muslim white supremacist, those facts would shape the U.K.’s foreign and security policies. If it’s just an instance of faulty construction, politicians can wring their hands on television, appropriate some emergency funds, and then move on.
It’s too soon to be sure exactly what caused the Grenfell Tower to burn. A thick plume of accusations suggests a lot of possible culprits: a faulty refrigerator; the recently installed cladding of cheap aluminum panels with a flammable core; the gap between the wall and the rain screen, which could have created a chimney effect and sped flames and smoke up the building’s exterior; ineffectual fire alarms; a lack of sprinklers; the presence of just a single fire stair. Behind the technical factors is another layer of social issues. Residents have accused building management and authorities of ignoring their chillingly specific complaints, perhaps because of a generalized disinterest in the building’s poor and largely Muslim population, or because of the pressures of gentrification from the neighborhood all around…
New Yorkers might be tempted to react complacently to some items on this list. Aluminum panels are common, but the slightly less expensive version with the flammable polyethylene core is not legal here. All buildings higher than 50 feet must have automatic sprinklers and two fire stairs, not one. And yet to argue those points is to miss the larger awfulness of the situation. Whether the proximate causes turn out to be corruption, venality, racism, or some combination of all three, the underlying sin is contempt for the people who must live in conditions they cannot control…
It’s always easy to malign the architecture of public housing projects as inherently inhumane. Many Americans see public housing as a machine for converting public funds into pathologies. Yet hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers continue to live in these buildings from another era, many more dwell in privately managed squalor, and 60,000 have no home at all. Even thousands of miles away, the Grenfell Tower blaze casts a ghoulish light on the importance of government’s least glamorous task: to fix what is broken for those who need it most. Because neglect is the moral equivalent of murder.
Wow. What kind of person writes this and hits print and has no idea of how appalled others will be? pic.twitter.com/Pioqx5rt8Q
— Susan of Texas (@SusanofTexas) June 16, 2017
I'm into cost-benefit analysis, but I find it hard to imagine "no flammable siding on high-rise towers" fails cost-benefit analysis.
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) June 17, 2017
The Times says the "fire resistant" panels cost £24. The flammable £22. Making the building non-flammable would have cost £5K more. Stunned. https://t.co/ijzs7iRISm
— Tom Peck (@tompeck) June 15, 2017
A poor person's life is worth £8.30.
(£5k divided by the 'up to 600 people') https://t.co/jyLW2PDXk4
— Jonathan Hume (@IamMrJ) June 15, 2017
Me: Triangle shirtwaist factory was a horrific tragedy.
You: Yes but no. Preventing it theoretically could increase price of shirtwaists.— Adam W Gaffney (@awgaffney) June 17, 2017
Speaking of a common thread among conservative ‘thinkers’…
'Don't politicise tragedy' pic.twitter.com/c8U2mBu4Sb
— david h hartery (@daithihartery) June 16, 2017
Shalimar
Extra cost would have been 5,000 pounds. The fund May is proposing for victims is 5 million pounds. Nice to see McArdle’s math skills are as horrible as ever. As Barros implies, the problem isn’t cost/benefit analysis, it is the idiot doing the cost/benefit analysis.
Baud
At the risk of taking McCardle seriously, by her logic, no governmental official can ever be criticized from deciding that the benefits of regulation outweigh the costs. Is that the type of super-deference that market-oriented conservatives are proposing to adopt for themselves? No, I didn’t think so.
Another Scott
A retired friend built a single-family house in Maryland a decade or so ago. The MD building code required sprinklers in all new single and two-family dwellings in the state. The lack of a requirement for sprinklers in renovated apartment buildings is beyond senseless.
Personally, I suspect (but don’t know anymore than anyone else in the public) that while the siding contributed to the disaster in London, the single fire exit and the routing of unprotected gas lines in the main stairwells probably had more to do with it…
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
HR Progressive
Glibertarians: “Regulation is expensive and it might save the lives of people who won’t vote for Real Insert Countrians Here, so of course it doesn’t really pass the cost-benefit analysis smell test”.
Fuck these actual sociopaths / morons.
Major Major Major Major
This reminds me of a recent write-up of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company as if it were a startup.
EBT
Not politicising tragedy is why tragedy keeps happening.
ThresherK
Me: Triangle shirtwaist factory was a horrific tragedy.
You: Yes but no. Preventing it theoretically could increase price of shirtwaists. And workers should have bargained individually to make the building safer.
ThresherK
@Major Major Major Major: Holeeee fuuck, how has that not crossed my radar yet?
Suzanne
@Another Scott:
They’re not required in renovated buildings in most of the US, either. All of the building code discussion regarding this tragedy that is in the political press has been really deficient, IMHO.
Buildings are subject to the codes in place at the time of their construction. And if they are renovated, only the renovated area is subject to the current codes. Things like exiting and sprinklers are building-wide changes not easily made. Literally, in many cases, improvement means complete demolition and reconstruction.
The crux of the issue is that, overwhelmingly, poor people live in old buildings, and those are full of hazardous materials like lead and asbestos, often with old electrical systems and unpermitted “improvements”, and there is nothing they can do about it. The Oakland Ghost Ship fire is the same thing…..poor and working-class people in a shitty housing situation because they can’t afford better, and there is no good regulatory mechanism in place to prevent that.
Suzanne
With regard to the question of “Could this type of fire happen here?, I will say this: this same material is on thousands of buildings in the country.
lollipopguild
@Baud: If you take cost/benefit out to its absurd logical extreme concerning national defence , you could make an idiot argument that we should spend no money on defence at all and just let our enemies come in and take over our country because it would save us a lot of our money.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
hueyplong
They previously politicized whether to make it safe, and now scream that you can’t politicize the failure of that prior sociopathic political “win” so as to make a different political choice in the aftermath.
germy
2012: Tory Prime Minister David Cameron declares war on “Safety Culture”
Another Scott
@Suzanne: Understood, and you’re the expert on this topic, but …
Yes, too many people live in dangerous, substandard housing. But when a government is paying for renovations of its own housing stock, it has a special responsibility to make sure that it sets an example for safety.
If they can route gas lines through stairways, they can route sprinklers through stairways…
If a building cannot be effectively renovated to make it safe, then it needs to be replaced. Making a renovated building into a firetrap doesn’t help anyone. :-(
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
germy
OK, I get it that Glibertarians don’t give a crap about human life.
But I thought they loved property. Wouldn’t sprinklers and non-flammable cladding protect their precious property? Surely they’d want to spend a few extra bucks (or pounds) to make sure their investment doesn’t go up in smoke?
Major Major Major Major
@Suzanne: in the Bay Area there’s the issue of so-called ‘soft story’ buildings, which are basically apartments above first stories lacking a load-bearing sheer wall, often garages. After Loma Prieta they changed the regulations on these and have mandated retrofitting. So it’s not unheard of. And yes, this is not high-income housing (relatively speaking), though that’s kind of a coincidence in this case.
Suzanne
Another thing to note: the vast majority of buildings do not have fire-rated exterior walls. It’s only required when buildings are in close proximity to other buildings, and only in buildings of certain types. Even if the building was sprinkled, typical fire sprinklers are designed to cover area only, not to douse walls (there are specific exceptions for dousing interior walls to achieve fire ratings, but not for exterior envelopes). The building codes in both the US and Europe will be changed after this disaster—that is typically why there are major updates—but that will not apply to buildings where this material is in place.
FlyingToaster
@Suzanne: That’s not entirely true.
I’m going to have to have my HVAC systems replaced. In order to meet code, I have to have the current “vent to the outside” pex tubes replaced by PVC piping to the plumbing stack — which means punching a hole in the ceiling of my office and the floor of the first floor bathroom.
Or I can’t have the HVAC replaced. My HVAC people won’t risk getting fined if they do renovations below code.
I can continue to have it repaired (as I did), but replacement requires meeting the current code. I’m going to see if I can have it enter the stack later with its own U and vent — which would be infinitely cheaper if done by a plumber instead of the HVAC people — before I bring the HVAC contractor back. And then I’ll be replacing both the basement and attic HVACs in sequence, preferably in the spring (like week of Patriots’ Day) when I can send the
whiny babiesspouse and daughter away.Suzanne
@Major Major Major Major: Yeah, soft story buildings are a problem. After 9/11, radio signal booster systems were mandated to be provided or updated in high-rises and high-importance occupancy types. It has happened that municipalities or AHJs will require improvements if it becomes known that a major catastrophe could occur (usually after one happens).
But that is very unusual. Adding things like sprinklers is surprisingly difficult to existing buildings, because they don’t have enough water supply or pressure and the pumping systems required are beaucoup bucks. I guarantee you that every building that you go into that is more than ten years old has something in it that is known to be a significant fire life safety problem.
Roger Moore
@EBT:
“Politicizing” a tragedy is bullshit. It’s a way of shutting down discussion. Preventing people from talking about what to do about something is just as political as discussing it would be.
Arclite
Fu king sociopaths.
BBA
I was under the impression that in the UK “council housing” was seen as for the working class rather than the absolute bottom of the lumpenproletariat as it is here. The discussion of this fire has a very American sheen on the politics, and I wonder if my impressions were wrong or the nuances aren’t getting across the ocean properly.
I am aware that an order of magnitude more people live in public housing there than here – 17% of the UK population vs around 2% in the US. Also that even more did before a lot of it was privatized under Thatcher, and the definitions are slippery.
My very expensive Manhattan apartment building is government-subsidized (tax breaks under 421a, financed through private activity muni bonds) in exchange for a handful of “affordable” apartments (and, allegedly, bribes to certain legislators, but you didn’t hear that from me). This means I might be considered live in “public housing” but it sure doesn’t feel like it.
Suzanne
@FlyingToaster: That’s essentially what I said: existing buildings stay where they are, but renovations and improvements have to be done under whatever code is in place. I am talking about large buildings, though, not single-family residences. If you renovate the interior finishes of a high-rise, you probably won’t have to upgrade the HVAC or the exiting. Want me to tell y’all about all the forty-year-old hospitals that have shitty HVAC systems that can’t achieve current standards for air changes or filtration because their systems are old, and people contract infections? That is the situation in every city in America.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Mike Rogers should get some kind of government pension for this, and the tax to fund it should be paid by people like McMeghan and Paul Ryan
I only wish more people knew about Ayn Rand and the influence she’s currently having on our government, especially health care.
Luthe
I cannot speak for how public housing authorities are monitored. But as someone who works for an affordable housing nonprofit and was on the property management frontlines, I can tell you HUD has pretty damn stringent regulations on any developer or landlord who accepts federal money. New construction has its plans examined multiple times to ensure it meets HUD standards. If the contractor wants to deviate from the submitted specs the change order has to be documented in triplicate. You want your final round of funds released? You better have sign-offs from every single local department that regulates building codes, from fire to health to the regular building department.
What about existing buildings?, you ask. Well, any landlord who takes Section 8 vouchers (and in affordable housing that’s almost everybody) will have inspectors on their ass at least once a year, if not more. The inspectors are only looking at the Section 8 units, but they also consider the building as a whole. Non-functioning smoke detectors are an automatic fail and you only have 24 hours to correct, but they’ll cite you for lots of things, like dripping faucets. Failure means no subsidy payments, so everyone corrects problems pretty quickly.
And that’s just on the federal level. While codes vary from state to state and town to town most building and fire officials don’t mess around, especially the ones in large cities. If you want to keep renting units, you’d best make sure you are in compliance with all local codes.
Tl;dr: No, it most likely can’t happen here, because for once our regulations are more strict than Britain’s.
Tom
I’m amazed Megan missed the opportunities to castigate the dead for not charging the fire.
Ohio Mom
I’d argue that something like the Grenfell Tower disaster DID happen here: a decision was made to “save” a relatively small amount of money in processing Flint’s water, and a disaster — though a slow-motion one — ensued. In both cases, the disaster affected the poor and powerless.
efgoldman
@germy:
It wasn’t “their” property, it was “government” property.
Suzanne
@Luthe: Europe’s building codes are about as strict as ours, but they have more older buildings. My firm has done a great deal of low-income senior housing, as well as facility assessments for public housing, and we find violations in existing buildings (of every type) all the time. Some of them are fixable. Some of them are not.
There are combustible composite metal panel rainscreen systems on thousands of buildings in this country. There will be changes made to the building code after this (the International codes are rewritten every three years), but what is already built will remain in place.
LurkerNoLonger
Fucking hell, what is it with “Conservatives” (on both sides of the pond) not wanting people to vote? I thought it was an American Conservatism thing. I guess it knows no boundaries.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
Neither does tearing down a building during a housing shortage. Real world governments have limited resources, and they have to prioritize. We can, and should, argue that the local council in this case did a lousy job of prioritizing, but we can’t act as if there’s always going to be enough money for everything we want to do.
BBA
The small amount of research I’ve done suggests that Britain’s building code consists of a few short paragraphs of binding requirements which use vague words like “reasonably” and “adequately”, plus hundreds of pages of technical specifications that are deemed to satisfy the binding regulations. So a building can violate the technical specs as long as it’s still “reasonably” safe.
This in contrast to the US where the hundreds of pages are all binding.
Hal
Yeesh. This week has me like:
Suzanne
@Ohio Mom:
The Oakland Ghost Ship fire was just a few months ago. While that building wasn’t publicly owned, the City of Oakland knew all about the situation—they had lots of reports of violations and knew people were living inside. There was a fire in some high-rise housing that was privately owned but received some sorts of public funding somewhere in the northeast shortly thereafter, and two kids died, and residents had been complaining of violations for years. This shit happens all the time.
The real bugger is that there are competing priorities: we want to keep as much existing building stock as is practicable, because it is not sustainable to replace it frequently (this kind of cladding is popular right now because it provides an easy way to provide better energy performance on an existing building). But construction labor is expensive, and often replacement is less expensive than the kind of improvements many of our buildings need.
Raoul
I for one look forward to flying on Air McArgleBargle. What’s the premium I need to pay to have enough fuel on board for a diversion if needed? Or for a trained & rested crew? Let the market decide!
Emergency O2 tanks and life vests can be purchased on the jetway, BTW. Along with a slightly soggy tempeh wrap or last month’s Atlantic magazine. Flight attendants not included.
Suzanne
@Roger Moore: If we tore down every building that had fire life safety code problems, we’d have no buildings left.
Also, as someone who does this as a job, let me tell you what every building owner says when I point out the problems they have and will need to fix if they renovate: “Why do I need to do THAT?! That’s never been a problem so far!”, to which I say, “That’s good luck, then.”
MattF
One thing to note is that cost/benefit analysis is bogus unless you look at the full distribution of costs and benefits, including outliers. In other words, comparing the £5K cost not spent on fire-proof cladding because of the low probability of catastrphe is just a mistake– you have to include the cost of catastrophe. Rare events can’t be ignored.
Ohio Mom
@Suzanne: Yes, you are right. I’d forgotten the Ghost Ship fire, don’t remember ever hearing about the other one you mention — I can see how an architect would have a good memory for building fires.
There are probably lots more examples of authorities/governments looking the other way when the safety of the less powerful intersects with spending money.
JPL
@Suzanne: It wasn’t uncommon decades ago to use aluminum wiring in houses. We appreciate your knowledge, and anything you can share about the material used to renovate the apartment. I’m not sure even the whacko DUP party can save May’s career.
MattF
I’d fix the spelling problems in my previous comment, except FYWP.
ThresherK
@Raoul: “Dearest Wife: I would have survived the jet crashing, but for my mistake in not carryihng enough cash to win the auction for a space on the liferaft after a water landing.”
D58826
The short answer is yes. On a Sat. night in Jan. 1991, a fire broke out in the janitors closet on the 22nd floor of the Meridian Bank Building in the heart of center city. Phila. The fire dept was handicapped by the lack of water pressure because the standpipe pumps failed. The firer spread up from the 22nd to the 29th floor. Three firemen died when they were caught above the fire. At some point in the middle of the night part of the curtain wall pulled free from the main structure. Fearing the kind of collapse that we saw 10 years later on 9/11 the fireman were pulled off the fire line. As thee sun came up they stood helpless at ground level while the fire spread upward unimpeded. Every one was waiting for the building to collapse. Suddenly in morning over the space or 30 minutes a miracle happened and the fire was stopped dead in it’s tracks before it could reach the 30th floor. The miracle – sprinklers. The water on the roof that feed the all to few sprinklers did the job it was designed for. If the sprinklers had been on the 22nd floor there would have been a burnt out closet. lots of wet desks and soggy paper. And most importantly 3 of Philly’s finest would have been able to dance at their daughters weddings.
Why no sprinklers? TO expensive. The building was a total loss so by the time you factored in that insurance loss, demolition and whatever other law suits it was more expensive than installing sprinklers when the build was built. But from the point of view of the builder/owner all of those costs were covered by insurance. It wasn’t out of his pocket. And if need be there was always the Donald Trump version of responsibility – bankruptcy.
Over fierce opposition of the real estate interests the city did change the building code to require new construction to be fully sprinkled. I Don’t remember what they decided with the existing building stock. But the moral of the story is profit is more important than people (well expect maybe for their personal residences).
I got a fund raising call yesterday from an antiabortion group. I will not call them pro-life because they are not. He asked me if I was pro-choice pro life or in the middle. Usually I just hang up but I was in a bad mood yesterday so I started told him emphatically pro-choice and then started to gibe him a piece of my mind. He wasn’t interest and hung up. The absurd thing is there is no ‘in the middle’. You can be opposed to abortion or you can be in favor of letting the woman decide. That covers pro-choice and in the middle. Palin and her ill-begotten daughter are PRO-Choice even though they deny it. She said how proud she was of Bristol; for choosing to have her first baby and not abort. Well that is CHOICE. Bristol decided. NOT the state, not her Mom, not some priest but Bristol. Twice she said that she chose to carry her youngest to term in spite of the Downs syndrome. Again she decided not her priest.
The GOP and the 1% do not give a rat’s butt about people unless they can legally pick their pocket or change the law to make an illegal;l act legal. And if 29 miners die in a preventable explosion, well Blankenship didn’t know any of them and getting the last ounce of coal to sell was more important the the men
Suzanne
@Ohio Mom: When we were in graduate school, we studied a bunch of famous building failures (fires, structural problems, natural disasters) and what the causes were and how the building industry changed afterward. Most of us still follow these out of perverse interest, and we also have lots of continuing education on this stuff. The fires are the spectacular failures that hurt a lot of people at once, but there are many. Hospitals with rooms in which it seems like every patient who stays in that one dies, and it turns out that there was a failure in construction that leaked exhaust air into the room, spreading infection. Etc etc etc.
Luthe
@Suzanne: What programs do you work with? I can see LIHTC buildings having those kinds of issues, but anything that has to pass a REAC inspection would be fixed I should think. Those inspectors have the vapors over quarter inch trip hazards.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: I appreciate that there are shades of grey in the real world. I work in a building that was dedicated in 1963. I understand the problems in old buildings (maybe not to the extent you do, but…).
(With the caveat that these are initial reports and likely to be garbled or even wrong:)
But one fire exit in a 24 story building? Routing unprotected gas lines in main stairwells? Lack of self-closing fire doors?
These aren’t little things.
It’ll be interesting to see what the final report says, and what changes are mandated (and whether the Tory UK government is willing to pay for them).
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
D58826
@Raoul: Was watching a video earlier today of fuel poring out of the wing of a, you guessed it, United jet at the gate. No one on the ground noticed it even though a white serve truck was parked by the wing and then drove away. Hard to believe the driver didn’t see or smell the jet fuel. Fortunately some one attracted the attention of the crew as they were about to turn on the runway and the take off was aborted.
SiubhanDuinne
@D58826:
United has become Untied.
scav
Ah, the zero-sum game re-emerges as the inevitable only playing field. You mere peoples’ safety inevitably comes at a cost to others. Your very lives and existence is put into the balence of what it might impact it might have on the lives of the chosen abstract ideal peoples lives even when meaured in mere dollar figures and found just simply not worth the inconvenience.
J R in WV
@Suzanne:
Could you post a link to the type of cladding that was used?
I’m interested if seeing what these panels are like. Are they similar to structural insulated panels? Because I’ve built with those, and have friends who have a roof made of copper-clad insulated panels…
Thanks for participating on the B-J site!
D58826
@Another Scott: The T word has not been mentioned and it sounds like the building had enough issues that plain old accidental ignition is the most likely cause. But if you can use a car, truck,knife or hammer as a terror weapon why not a good old arson fire. With those violations, a few Molotov cocktails on a couple of floors and the curtain wall and it would be real easy to turn it into a towering inferno. I’ve seem plenty of abandoned multi-story factory building full involved on the news but never what looked like a roman candle.
Roger Moore
@JPL:
And we don’t require homeowners to replace their old aluminum wiring the moment it’s pointed out to them*. Instead, we wait until they’re either already rewiring something or when they’re selling their house and an insurance company says they won’t insure it unless it’s brought up to code. Even then, there are cheaper approaches, like special fittings and devices that are designed to be safe with aluminum wiring, that people will try very hard to use instead of complete rewiring.
*I’ve been learning something about wiring, so I’ll point out that aluminum wiring is still quite common in specific applications. The biggest safety problems with aluminum wiring were with small branch circuits (i.e. the 15 and 20 amp circuits connected to lights and outlets), where people have mostly gone back to using copper. Larger wires used for higher amperage circuits had fewer problems, so aluminum is still commonly used there. It’s especially common in service wiring and large feeders, where the cost of the actual wires is as important as installation cost, and in places like overhead wiring where aluminum’s better mechanical properties are important.
D58826
And on a totally different topic I just saw this on twitter –
I know he is one of the prime Hillary haters. I have a modest proposal – when ever someone registers as a democrat, the state will supply a single dose of hemlock. That way you can avoid all of this nonsense and just put yourself of of your misery quickly and easily.
https://twitter.com/SarahLerner/status/875784105689927680
Suzanne
@JPL: The cladding was an insulated metal panel (called composite panel in the industry). It was used as a “rainscreen”, which means that the panels themselves were not the waterproof layer of the building exterior, and that water could drain behind the panel. These systems are incredibly popular both for their aesthetic and for their energy performance, as well as ease of construction. Modern building codes in the US and Europe require a great deal more energy efficiency than was required back in the 70s, when that tower was built. Buildings of that era in both the US and Europe are notoriously leaky and inefficient, because energy was cheap at the time. In the last 10-15 years, the code has moved to requiring most buildings (not single-family homes) to be continuously insulated, meaning that the insulative layer cannot be interrupted by “thermal bridges” like studs or masonry webs. This has resulted in some pretty elaborate exterior wall systems.
The metal panel systems are perfect for these types of retrofits. They have these proprietary fastening systems that allow them to be compliant with the continuous insulation requirements, they look good and are easy to maintain, and they are very high-performing (I’ve used Centria many times). They also go up fast, and don’t usually require demolition of much of the existing exterior wall. So they’re all over the place. My firm is literally in the middle of this type of renovation on a large hospital right now.
Again: most buildings of this type do not have fire-rated exterior walls. The problem is that the insulation proved to be more combustible than originally thought. Since those exteriors are usually not fire-rated, that wasn’t seen as an issue. That will now change.
MattF
@D58826: I can see ‘earthquake leads to broken gas lines leads to explosion’ as an ‘act of God’, but maybe ”T word’ leads to explosion’– not so much.
efgoldman
@JPL:
Our house was built in ’62, right around that time. I made sure the inspector checked for aluminum when we bought it. All copper.
Yeah, aluminum and copper didn’t play well together.
Redshift
I saw a tweet of a story that a Tory minister in May’s government had sat on a report about hazards like this, and the first response was that the poster shouldn’t be trying to take partisan advantage and should wait until we knew for certain what the cause is.
In case anyone was wondering if that sort of thing was just from American conservatives.
Suzanne
@J R in WV: I don’t know which brand was used there. Centria is a very popular one in the US, and from what I’ve heard, the product on Grendel’s was very similar.
@Another Scott: No, those aren’t little things. Those are big problems. The number of exits is such a big problem in and of itself that it might be unfixable.
@Luthe: I am afraid that I can’t tell you about that part. We were hired by a number of our local municipalities to do assessments of public housing in our metro area, and we work with a lot of private developers, too (so I can’t name them here), but I don’t know all of the ins-and-outs of how and from whom the money flows. I can tell you that we found violations in all of the buildings. But we find fire life safety violations in buildings of every type. Even office buildings for rich people.
D58826
@MattF:
terrorism. didn’t want to be like CNN BREAKING NEWS
Ken
Just what is McArdle’s audience, anyway? Sociopaths almost by definition don’t need to be reassured that other people think like them.
JPL
@efgoldman: It’s not foolproof, but I’ve been known to inspect that myself. If it hasn’t been piggybacked with copper, it’s easy to tell by just removing a switch plate. We lived in CT at a time that a family died on Long Island because of aluminum wiring. It must have been the late seventies, anyway it was on the market a lot longer than that.
foolproof by meaning taking off the switch plate. Unless you pull out the wiring, you can’t tell whether or not that piggy backed a copper feed to the outlet.
debbie
@Suzanne:
What about the building’s single stairwell? Is there much of that over here for buildings of comparable size?
MattF
@Ken: Herself, first of all.
Felonius Monk
@Redshift:
Weasels is Weasels. Doesn’t matter if they are Ameri-weasels or Euro-weasels.
Suzanne
Why did autocorrect change it to “Grendel”? DYAC.
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:
The reports I’ve seen said that there are more and less fire resistant versions of this kind of exterior cladding. They said that the US code is stricter in this case, so that the panels used on this building would not have been allowed in the US. They mentioned at least a couple of other requirements under US code that would have helped, e.g. that a similar building in the US would have needed three emergency escape routes instead of one. So the specific hazards in this case probably would have been prevented in the US. I assume, though, that there are other hazards where the US code is laxer than the UK.
Suzanne
@debbie: Number of exits is determined by number of occupants and size of the floor plate. I heard that the building had two stairways, but that one of them was blocked off with equipment or construction or something. A residential building of that size in the US would probably have two stairs, as well.
efgoldman
@JPL:
A previous owner had replaced the original fuse box (still there, but not attached to anything) with breakers. Don’t know when. I think probably late 80s. Also don’t know if they replaced the wiring or just hooked up the existing, but it’s all copper.
MomSense
@Ken:
Sociopaths. All of them.
rikyrah
This is Driving While Black
The Crisis Magazine @thecrisismag
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Stopped 46 times, racking up more than $6,000 in fines, records show that #PhilandoCastile spent most of his driving life fighting tickets.
JPL
@JPL: not piggy backed.. but pigtailed.
@Suzanne: Is pigtailing an adequate solution for aluminum wiring, or should you just rewire the house?
rikyrah
uh huh
Professor SocioloGal @StlGal_36
If you needed any more proof that ‘conceal and carry’ is only for white people, the inJustice system proved it. #PhilandoCastile #BLM
schrodingers_cat
Tories and their friends here want to bring back the Victorian standards of living. Didn’t Newtie want to bring back child labor too?
rikyrah
Tim WiseVerified account @timjacobwise
When u say All Lives Matter but go silent when #PhilandoCastile is killed & his killer acquitted, u let us know who ISN’T part of ‘all’ to u
debbie
@rikyrah:
Did you see Anne’s post this morning with Gene Denby’s tweets? Castile was stopped 46 times, but only six of them were for things cops could have observed (ie, speeding, broken muffler). The harassment he suffered is intolerable. I’d like to see a Dem (Kamala?) introduce legislation in Congress criminalizing nationwide all deliberate harassment and other programs like stop and frisk.
Suzanne
@Roger Moore: There are some panels that have more or less combustibility, but there are definitely combustible panels in use in the US. Building codes vary by municipality. And it usually takes a tragedy occurring before the code gets updated.
In the US, there was some research into “super-insulated” buildings a while back, and wouldn’t you know it, wall fires occurred. The buildings were smaller so people got out, and the code was updated. But again, existing material remains in place.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Poor people are expendable. Can you even think what would happen if somebody built country clubs so cheaply, and skimped on safety so much that hundreds of golfers went up as they were kicking back after eighteen holes when the dining rooms caught fire each year? Or if eight or ten bank headquarters fell in on themselves every year, killing hundreds of presidents, vice presidents and chairmen of the board? How long would it take before Congress put some laws through outlawing that kind of cheap, shoddy building work?
Redshift
@Ken:
People who want to be reassured that any money spent to help the less fortunate is surely wasted, so they can continue to believe that their selfishness is justified and isn’t really selfishness, just common sense.
I don’t think most are actually sociopaths. They do care about other people, up to the number where other people become a more abstract concept and then they don’t want to be bothered. We only instinctively give consideration to the size of group we lived in back in our hunter gatherer days, up to a hundred or so; organizing anything beyond that takes appealing to rational thought.
Suzanne
@JPL: I’d have to ask an electrical engineer if it’s okay in a single-family house. (I do big buildings, and it’s not okay in those, but many things that are not allowed in other occupancy types are allowed in houses).
Yeah, the typical single-family house is the most dangerous building most of us ever go into.
Roger Moore
@JPL:
Pigtailing is supposed to be OK, but only if you use connectors designed to work with mixed aluminum and copper wire. There are also devices that are designed to work with aluminum wiring without needing a pigtail, which are marked “CO-ALR”.
schrodingers_cat
One of the houses we saw when we were looking at houses last years was a 200 year old house with extremely scary wiring in the basement. It had been retrofitted with electricity from the days of gas. It had charming details and a gorgeous dining room and a very weird bathroom just off the kitchen. We passed on it.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
David Clarke rescinds his name for the DHS position
Adria McDowell (formerly Lurker Extraordinaire
In Germany, apparently they don’t tear down the exterior of old buildings, but completely gut them, then put in new interiors. That way, the building retains its old world charm but is modern inside. I assume they try to put in all the latest safety features. Fires still happen, of course.
We were told it was illegal there to tear down a perfectly good exterior wall. Don’t know how true that is, but it’s why places like Heidelberg, Wurzburg, and Munich look like they do.
Aleta
An article by Propublica + the nyt about the Kushner housing empire said that in 2011 he began buying distress-ridden, Class B apartment complexes in the Rust Belt (especially Ohio, Pa). In foreclosure, at half the mortgage value. Eventually over 6,500 units. In Maryland, Ohio and New Jersey, 34 complexes, or around 20,000 units. And 15 complexes in the Baltimore area, most from the 1960s and ’70s, with fi-na* -ncing from Fre -ddie M ac, estimated to house more than 20,000 people.
Their purpose for the company is steady cash flow, not appreciation in value. Kushner said, “Our goal is to keep buying and incrementally growing — they’re good markets where you can get yield.”
Renters are “ca -si -no workers, distribution-warehouse pickers, U -ber drivers, students at for-profit colleges. … (The majority of tenants) pay rents ranging from about $800 to $1,300, and some of them receive S -ect -ion 8. … Baltimore County has no public housing for a population of more than 825,000, so these and similar complexes have become the de facto substitute.”
Nightmare stories follow, neglected repairs, leaks and broken plumbing, rust, broken walls, wiring problems, and severe mold. And harassing tenants in court for money they don’t owe. (Some moved out years before Kushner even bought the building.)
Kushner wins judgements (in Baltimore County 9 out of 10) because the tenants are confused, don’t appear in court or don’t hire lawyers. Then Kushner demands they pay his legal fees. (He has dedicated legal firms pursue these cases.). People are crushed by the payments, and then Kushner attaches their wages.
Single mothers who are working and taking courses to advance, but then have to drop out because of the de -bt and wage loss. Women and families who are right in line with Ivanka’s passions: women who work, job training, busy mothers of cute children.
Anyway, H -UD scams here we come, paid for by lower income renters who are trapped and fi-na*n ced by US taxpayers.
Roger Moore
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
So the question is who didn’t want to associate with whom. It’s an interesting question which one in that pair decided the other was unacceptable.
SiubhanDuinne
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD):
When you’ve lost David Clarke….
JPL
@Roger Moore: I’m so glad that we had this discussion, because of hearing of fires in the seventies and eighties, I was aware of the problems. My ex retired from the I’ve been moved company. When my son bought his first house a decade plus ago, I insisted he check. Now that he’s married and planning on buying a family friendly house in a good school district, it’s important to remind him.
D58826
@Aleta:
And the people who live there are just collateral damage.
D58826
@SiubhanDuinne: AH since I don’t think there ever was a formal offer from the administration he basically un-invited himself from a ‘party’ that he had never really been invite to. But well played none the less
Redshift
@schrodingers_cat: A guy I know owned an old house and was having some renovation work done. The foreman of the crew took off a wall plate and found that when they converted from gas light to electricity, they had just plugged the gas lines with some caulk instead of sealing them, and in the decades since, it had dried out and shrunk. He very calmly told everyone to stop and leave the house until they could call the gas company, since no one knew if it was shut off outside either.
D58826
@ThresherK: Well they could have just bought their own fire extinguishers to work every day. And the jumpers should have though ahead and put mattress on the ground around the building Employees are just so short sighted.
danielx
When there are more horrible justifications to be written, McMegan will write them.
JPL
@Redshift: The people who bitch about construction being not like the olden days, have no idea what bullshit they are spewing.
Aleta
@debbie: This is from NPR, July 2016 and has more of that information.
For example, “June 2005 He is charged with “impeding traffic,” which means going too slowly or perhaps blocking the box at an intersection. That charge is dismissed, but he is again convicted of having no proof of insurance. That means a year’s probation and a $778 fine, which he has problems paying.” NPR shows the exact records.
schrodingers_cat
@Redshift: We saw another old farm house from the 1800s the kitchen floor was so tilty that it gave our real estate agent, vertigo.
Suzanne
@JPL: Thank FSM construction isn’t like the old days. The days when poor people lived in houses with thatched roofs and burned candles, the days when people emptied their chamber pots into the street, the days when masons and ironworkers died during construction, the days when buildings couldn’t keep people temperate or healthy.
Roger Moore
@D58826:
No. Collateral damage implies that it’s an unfortunate but necessary accident. These people are evil, and ruining the lives of the poor people they’re exploiting is a definite positive for them. It’s icing on the cake.
Ruckus
@D58826:
Not to the asshole who owns the properties they aren’t. They are an income stream until they are bleed dry and then kicked out and replaced. To believe in the concept of collateral damage something/someone has to have ongoing value. To kushner they don’t have value if they can not maintain his income stream. He has no concept of humanity, no one he knows has. He has his selfish ass and that’s the extent of it. He learned that from his father, just like drumpf learned to be a gigantic dick from his father.
Luthe
@Aleta: How the fuck do they continue to receive Section 8 funding? Do they pay off the HQS inspectors*? Or do they just keep up the maintenance in those units and let everyone else suffer?
*If you fail an HQS inspection, they yank your Section 8 subsidy until you fix all the violations.
Mom Says I'm Handsome
Not pertinent to the conversation per se, but
is the wrong use of the word disinterest.
Disinterest means impartiality.
If you mean lack of interest, say lack of interest..
Suzanne
@Luthe: I would imagine that the inspections aren’t too thorough in areas that aren’t readily visible. Or they pay them off.
I specialize in healthcare architecture, so my clients’ buildings are regularly inspected by Joint Commission or DNV. Despite lots of work by the facilities managers, all of them get findings every time. The inspections look at maybe one percent of the above-ceiling areas, at most. FYI, the most common finding in healthcare facilities are breaches of fire-rated walls and barriers.
efgoldman
@schrodingers_cat:
mrs efgoldman’s family bought an 1841 farmhouse in 1954. When they moved in. there were still bare wire pairs strung between glass insulators up the walls.
My late FIL was (1) extremely handy and (2) Believed very strongly that everything had to be up to code.
JPL
@Suzanne: When I removed paneling from the lower half of a great room there was a small section, really small that wasn’t insulated and I used crumpled up NYtimes. Baud would be proud. Truth be told, it was so small you couldn’t buy insulation except in larger rolls.
We are so glad to have your expertise though.
Luthe
@Suzanne: No, Section 8 inspectors don’t usually do the not readily visible bits. But from the article it seemed the problems were pretty damn visible. Mold, broken windows, holes in the wall… all of those would be violations. They get you for drips under the sink and slow draining tubs, as well as stains on the ceiling and dirty floors. I’m betting on payoffs.
rikyrah
McArdle is another person that is a prime example of never bringing up Affirmative Action ever again. Her ignorant mediocre self just disgusts me.
Anne Laurie
@Ken:
People who care more about money than people. They pay her to be, literally, a public mouthpiece: See, it’s not just me — this highly-credentialled pundit agrees with my deeply reasoned stance! And she’s not even a white man, so you can stop muttering under your breath about ‘dicks being dicks’…
jl
The McArdle piece took around 1000 words to mention that it is possible that safety regulations might cost more than they are worth in terms of lives and property saved. Wow, I wrote out that trite truism in 16 words. Can I take over McArdle’s column? For balance, I’ll also write that sometimes skimping on safety measures should be a crime, when the cost of the safety is very small compared to the cost of the accident. That’s 24 words. I’d add it especially should be a crime when lives are at stake that cannot easily avoid the dangers. I think that’s another 17. So that is less than 60 words. More complete and wise than McArdle’s piffle, if I may be so bold.
Bloomberg could have made a buck filling up the rest of the space with ads. I’ll write them and see if they’ll give me McArdle’s column. I think it would be a win-win. I’ll watch for the report on the tragedy to see what the trouble was. Fires in tall residential buildings are not all that rare, but I don’t remember reading about one that spread so quickly and was so dangerous. Seems like something went very wrong. Thanks to commenter above linking to callous and inexcusable quote by previous Troy brass on housing. if Tory housing policies played a role, hope that party pays a political price for their malfeasance.
Anne Laurie
@schrodingers_cat:
Well, he wanted public school kids to perform janitorial duties to “earn” their free lunches. But he added, IIRC, that those kids needed to learn about work ethics anyway… after he got pushback from “nice” middle-class parents pointing out that kids didn’t need to be (further) stigmatized. It would also, he was happy to tell them, help break the ‘entrenched civil service unions’ where a professional maintenance crew might get a chance to enter the middle class & provide ‘unnecessary competition’ to cost-plus contractors…
jl
Tories will probably pay a political price anyway. May seems like a dreadful, arrogant and cowardly politician. I read she wouldn’t go to the scene of the tragedy, supposedly because of concerns about security. The the royals popped by with little fanfare. Almost as if the queen woke up and mentioned in passing at breakfast that they they really should stop by and talk with the folk about that awful fire. So they popped down the garage and took off. More or less. read that they did with such little fanfare or visible security, some locals didn’t even know for a while that they were there.
So, I guess a royal family some some decent ethical bones in their bodies can be useful for the body politic.
jl
@Anne Laurie: These people are monstrous and they think they are so clever they can fool people. Set up an educational school activity, like a school garden, or other practical education project that would teach kids to work just as well, and they would scream about liberal indoctrination, too much money, whatever to get it closed down. Of course you would have white kids and black kids and other kids, poor kids and not poor kids working and learning together, which probably sounds sinister to people like Lil’ Newtie.
Another Scott
@Anne Laurie: Hey, it was good enough for Rep. Virginia Foxx…
Don’t we all want to go back to those wonderful years where kids worked in their schools and returned to homes without electricity and running water?!?!1
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@Aleta:
Absolutely maddening.
Sloane Ranger
I suspect that Austerity is the villain here. The police have said they’ve looked at what they think was the place the fire started and there’s no evidence for either the T word or other A word.
In the meantime Govt caps on Council tax rises has created a funding crisis in many Councils and other services funded locally. leading to reduced staffing. Also Local Govt procurement rules require VFM which, in my experience, means the cheapest legal option available.
I don’t think there will be one cause here but rather a series of systemic failures. Staffing reductions leading to reduced fire inspections, overworked and inexperienced planning application staff overlooking a potential issue where different aspects of the renovation the block received interlocked. Things like this.
As for May, she is trying to get out ahead of this. From a PR POV her initial reluctance to meet with victims increased peoples anger but she has now met a deputation of them at No10, made £5 million available to assist the victims and promised to permanently rehouse everyone affected locally within the next 3 years. As well as admittted that the initial aid effort was inadequate. It remains to be seen if this will be enough to save her.
The people who really come out badly in this are the officers of Ken and Chelsea Boroughs Council. They appeared smug and arrogant when interviewed in the immediate aftermath and, have apparently, been AWOL since then. Peoples frustration with them led to local people trying to force their way into their offices yesterday.
JAFD
@Luthe: Dumbish question ?
Have relative living in subsidized housing, think it has some fire safety issues, wondering how to get in touch with these inspectors, mention concern, possibly get inspectors’ report for their building ?
Thanks for whatever help you can give me with this.
jl
@Sloane Ranger: thanks for the info. What does ‘VFM’ mean?
Another Scott
@jl: Not SR, but I think it means “Value For the Money” which I take it is a UK-ism for certain government purchasing rules (that likely over-reward low price).
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Sloane Ranger
@jl: Value for Money.In theory it’s meant to look at quality, reliability, how long it will last. In reality cost considerations tend to predominate.
jl
@Another Scott: That’s what I thought. I looked it up but didn’t find anything specific enough to be useful. I concluded it was something like US rule that forces a public contract to go to lowest bidder.
@Sloane Ranger: thanks again for the info.
Luthe
@JAFD: Define “subsidized housing.” There are a lot of different types of subsidized housing out there, all with different rules and inspections. Are you talking public housing, LIHTC financed affordable housing, Section 8 vouchers, HUD 811, PRAC 202, or some purely state financed program?
randy khan
@D58826:
I was in Philadelphia the night of that fire for my cousin’s wedding. It was terrible.
And I should add that insurance did not cover everything. I worked with a company that had offices in that building. Their offices were uninhabitable and literally toxic. If they wanted documents someone had to go in a hazmat suit to find them, and then they needed to be cleaned up. Insurance didn’t cover that, and so the company – despite a very stringent policy about what documents were important enough to retrieve – spent hundreds of thousands of dollars (maybe millions) to get documents that were critical to its business.
mellowjohn
“Papering over Poverty.” as usual, it takes a comedian to get to the heart of the matter. Jonathon Pie seems to be Britain’s answer to the late, great George Carlin.
https://www.facebook.com/JonathanPieReporter/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED&fref=nf
Mart
Bellagio tower in Vegas Exterior Finish Insulatong System (EFIS) burned similarly. The EFIS system passes a ridiculous small scale flame spread test so it can be marketed as fire resistant. In three dimensional large scale tests it burns like foam plastic – solid gasoline. It is all over the place – most any updated strip mall uses EFIS to dress up
JAFD
@Luthe: I _think_ she’s under Section 8, know that at least some of the apartments in her building are rented under Section 8.
Thanks for your help with this.