NFPA Journal - July/August 2019 - 10

Dispatches

DELAYED
RESPONSE

TWO YEARS AFTER THE GRENFELL TOWER FIRE,
THOUSANDS OF BUILDINGS IN THE UK, AND
POSSIBLY WORLDWIDE, REMAIN AT RISK FROM
COMBUSTIBLE EXTERIOR WALL ASSEMBLIES.
EXPERTS SAY THAT SHOULDN'T COME AS A SHOCK.
By Angelo Verzoni
n May 29, two weeks

before the twoyear anniversary of the Grenfell
Tower fire, the New York Times
published a story suggesting that
tens of thousands of Britons are
still at risk of dying in a blaze similar to the one
that killed 72 people and injured 70 more in
London on June 14, 2017.
The Grenfell fire-which raced up and around
the 24-story Grenfell Tower apartment complex
at astonishing speed, leaving behind little more
than a blackened shell-was fueled in large
part by combustible plastics that were present
in exterior wall materials that had been added
to Grenfell a couple of years earlier as part of
a renovation project. In the wake of the fire,
government officials in the United Kingdom
vowed to eliminate the risk from such materials
throughout the country.

O

As the two-year
anniversary of
London's Grenfell Tower fire
passed in June, the
victim advocate
group Grenfell
United launched a
public education
campaign that projected messages
onto buildings that
still contain safety
deficiencies similar
to the ones that
existed in Grenfell.

10 | NFPA JOURNAL * J U L Y /A U G U S T 2 0 1 9

A costly, complicated task
According to the Times, since the
Grenfell blaze, the UK government has
allocated about £400 million, or a little
over half a billion US dollars, to help
local authorities strip and replace combustible exterior wall assemblies from hundreds of
public housing buildings, and that work is ongoing. The bigger problem now, the newspaper
said, are privately owned high-rise apartment
buildings, for which "nobody want[s] to pay to
remove the cladding."
The situation doesn't surprise Messerschmidt,
who knows just how costly and complicated
that work can be. "Imagine trying to peel a huge

DAVID LEVENE/ THE GUARDIAN

PUBLIC SAFETY

But the Times story indicates there's
still a long way to go.
"About 16,000 private apartments [in
the UK] are still wrapped in the kind of
exterior cladding that fed the Grenfell
fire," the newspaper said. "Their owners
feel trapped in tinderboxes they cannot
sell, and some residents have felt compelled to join round-the-clock patrols of
their buildings, always on guard for a
spark or whiff of smoke."
For those who study the problem or
who work to reduce the fire risk of combustible exterior wall materials like the
ones that sheathed Grenfell, the Times
piece was troubling but not surprising,
given the expense and complexity of
removing and replacing these materials.
Furthermore, in recent conversations
with NFPA Journal, these experts
stressed that although the Times story
implies the regulation of the materials
is strong in other countries, such as the
United States, the presence of combustible exterior wall assemblies-a term
used to describe the entire exterior wall
system of a building, which is often
simply and erroneously referred to as
"cladding"-should still be a concern
worldwide, not just in the UK.
"It doesn't surprise me," Birgitte
Messerschmidt, director of the Applied
Research Division at NFPA, said of the
Times' reporting. "What happened at
Grenfell was very scary, but I've seen
similar conditions in many other buildings around Europe, as well as around
the world."
NFPA Journal - July/August 2019

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