We won't get together and get some damn sprinklers installed in any old apartments because of this. There won't even be any Grenfell moments, nothing like that in this country. Just a few moments to shake our heads at this until the next tragedy shows up to make us forget about this one.
The building owner is Rubin Schron, a massive landlord who owns 1200 buildings in NYC, and is well known for funding pro-landlord candidates in local races.
One man rescued by firefighters said he’d become numb to fire alarms because of frequent false alarms.
This is a big thing too. Two apartments ago I was in a hundred-year-old building where each unit was owned by a different landlord and no one seemed to be responsible for the building itself and the fire alarm went off all the time because there was a sensor box that water dripped into whenever there was precipitation or snow melt. I def would've died if there was ever a real fire because I was pretty much trained to ignore it.
In all, more than five dozen people were hurt.
I feel like "five dozen" is intentionally misleading, because it sounds like way less than "60".
What was the consequence of Grenfell, anyway? I thought Brits just used it as an excuse to further defund public housing.
From wikipedia:
By November 2019, the Government had identified 446 residential and publicly owned buildings in England over 18 metres in height with ACM cladding of the kind used on Grenfell Tower that were unlikely to meet Building Regulations and had pledged £600m towards paying for remediation. However, as investigations arising from the Grenfell disaster proceeded, along with the Barking Riverside fire in June 2019 and the Bolton Cube fire in November 2019, it became clear that far more buildings in the UK either used materials that did not meet safety standards or were otherwise not constructed in accordance with building regulations.[218] By June 2020, around 2,000 high-risk buildings had been identified over 18m tall in England alone; a further 9,600 high-rise buildings thought to have combustible cladding; and 100,000 between 11 and 18 metres whose status was as yet unknown.[219] 2019 saw a collapse in confidence in the safety of blocks of flats among mortgage lenders and insurers, leading to the freezing of a substantial section of the UK housing market.[218] By February 2021, the government had pledged somewhat over £5bn towards the remediation of fire safety problems — a figure that still fell far short of the costs involved, many of which were being borne by owners of flats who had bought them in the belief that they had been built legally.[220]
The structual problems uncovered by Grenfell-related investigations uncovered that the problem was way way way bigger than anyone had thought, so the Government threw a bit more money at the problem, then fucked off. Fire vulnerable cladding is going to be treated more or less the way we treat asbestos now - landlords will be asked nicely to get rid of it on their own time, and new construction has less combustible cladding than Grenfell.
This sucks; and there was just a similar instance in Philly this week too, although it was 13 out of 26 people dying in two overcrowded public housing units. 7 kids died in that one too, it’s just so shitty.
I didn't even know about that, that's absolutely horrible. This is what I'm worried about, these deaths already happen in the background, they'll just make local news for a week like school shootings.
