Hundreds of thousands in UK face same fire risk as Grenfell Tower victims
By
Robert Stevens
26 June 2017
Residents of tower blocks throughout the UK are living in potential death traps just like the Grenfell Tower block in west London where scores if not hundreds perished on June 14. Initial testing of external cladding on 60 apartment blocks located in 25 local authorities resulted in them all being found to be combustible and failing fire safety tests.
The 60 tested so far were among 600 of the UK’s 4,000 tower blocks with cladding found to be “similar” to that installed on the Grenfell Tower. The cladding was a central factor in the spread of a small fire in one apartment into a conflagration that engulfed the entire 24-storey structure in minutes.
While at least 79 people are confirmed dead in the blaze, Labour MP Dianne Abbott, who represents a constituency in nearby Hackney, said she believed “hundreds of people” were killed in the fire.
Both the cladding and the insulation it enclosed at Grenfell have been tested by experts and “failed all safety tests.” According to latest reports, the insulation material could prove to be even more flammable than the cladding—which was already known to be highly combustible.
Given that at least 600 people lived in the Grenfell block, this number extrapolated nationally means that hundreds of thousands of peoples’ lives are endangered by the homes in which they live.
Everything is being done to conceal the criminality of the policies and actions of successive governments and local councils, Conservative and Labour, and their big business partners, that resulted in the horrifying loss of life.
Last Friday a local resident, Sarah Colbourne, who lives near Grenfell, told the media she does not accept the official…