On the 14th June 2017, at 54 minutes after midnight, Behailu Kebede was woken by the smoke alarm sounding in his flat – flat 16 – on the 4th floor of the Grenfell Tower. The Grenfell Tower was a 20-storey block of 127 flats in West London built originally in 1972 but which had been more recently renovated during 2015 and 2016. The renovation work had included new windows and an exterior cladding to smarten up the building and improve insulation.
The main structure of the building comprised a central core containing two lifts, one staircase and vertical ducts for services plus exterior perimeter columns sitting on a 2-metre-deep concrete base and 4-metre-deep basement. The construction consisted of a mixture of in-situ concrete columns and slabs plus pre cast concrete beams.
The building had been constructed on behalf of the local authority as social housing and the original construction methods used were very typical for its era and unremarkable. The style was Brutalist and the cladding applied in 2015 and 2016 was intended no only to improve insulation but also to make the building more attractive.
Mr Kebede went to his kitchen and found smoke billowing from a fire at the back of his fridge freezer with a build-up of smoke near his kitchen window. He dialled 999. The fire spread out through the window (which had a UPVC frame) and engulfed the exterior cladding panels which began to burn vigorously. The resultant fire was the worst residential fire since the Second World War. It burnt for 24 hours. In the end 72 people had died, 70 were injured and 223 had managed to escape.
The death toll was made worse because residents aware of the fire who had phoned the emergency services were advised initially to remain in their flats rather than immediately evacuate and the fire brigade was unprepared when faced with a tower block clad in a material which readily burned.
MFG readers will all be very familiar by now with the Grenfell Tower disaster, the on-going public enquiry and the regulatory and corporate scandal which has emerged. They will also be aware of the repercussions which have affected flats built using modern methods of construction incorporating potentially inflammable cladding.
It is unfortunately characteristic of the building industry that we proceed by a process of trial and error to devise the most appropriate methods of construction for any particular circumstance and climate. The Great Fire of London in 1666 taught us that it was not a good idea to construct buildings largely of wood with thatched roofs and pack them closely together so when London was rebuilt following the fire new rules including the use of brick and stone with better design were enforced.
Similarly the Ronan Point collapse (another local authority tower block) in the 1970’s alerted us to the fact that buildings constructed of prefabricated concrete panels clipped together are only as robust as the fixings used and rely for their strength on the quality of the workmanship which may be covered up and inaccessible and impossible to check subsequently.
Architects and engineers design new buildings and are also normally responsible for upgrading existing structures including retro-fitting insulation as was the case with the Grenfell Tower. They are typically enthusiastic about new ideas and novel forms of building construction. They are currently under pressure to make our buildings more energy efficient.
Surveyors, on the other hand, have to inspect these buildings on behalf of prospective purchasers and mortgage lenders at various times over the building life span so we see the results of innovative construction long after the original architects and engineers have moved on to other projects. Surveyors tend to be sceptical. We have seen too many examples of new building materials or novel forms of construction which were heralded as a great advance at the time only to suffer from unanticipated problems further down the line.
The reluctance on the part of surveyors to recommend a particular type of construction as suitable mortgage security is frequently criticised by brokers and intermediaries acting for mortgage applicants. Older surveyors (and I am one of these) who like to see traditional and well tested construction methods will be sometimes seen as unnecessarily conservative.
Intermediaries and brokers who find that an applicant’s mortgage application is frustrated by a surveyor’s decision to decline the property as unsuitable security should draw a deep breath and suggest that the applicant looks elsewhere for another home. The surveyor is just doing his or her job and safeguarding the mortgage lender’s loan. The decision may also prevent the applicant making an unwise purchase.
Peter Glover is a Surveyor and author of “Building Surveys and Buying a House or Flat”
